Climate Refugees and Displacement Hotspots

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), based in Geneva, tracks disaster-related displacement annually and reported that weather-related hazards — floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires — triggered around 32.6 million new internal displacements worldwide in 2022 alone, a figure that in most years substantially exceeds displacement caused by conflict and violence. Looking further ahead, the World Bank's Groundswell report, first published in 2018 and updated in 2021, projects that slow-onset climate impacts such as water scarcity, declining crop productivity, and sea-level rise could drive as many as 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050 across six world regions studied, with Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America identified as the largest hotspots.