In its 2025 annual Global Trends Report released Thursday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has delivered a mixed update on the global forced displacement crisis: for the first time in 10 years, the total number of people displaced by conflict, violence and persecution has declined — yet the overall figure remains at a devastatingly high level that demands urgent global action.
By the end of 2025, the global count of forcibly displaced people stood at 117.8 million, encompassing refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other groups requiring international protection. Tarek Abou Chabake, UNHCR’s chief statistician, outlined two key drivers behind the historic drop: a rise in the number of people returning to their regions of origin, and growing numbers of refugees gaining citizenship in their host countries. Even with this milestone decline, UNHCR leadership stressed that the scale of displacement is far too high to ignore, with ongoing conflicts continuing to uproot millions of vulnerable people globally.
Breaking down the report’s key demographic and geographic data, children made up 39% of the world’s 41.6 million total refugee population in 2025. While Colombia, Germany and Turkey each hosted more than 2 million refugees, the vast majority of the global refugee population resides in low- and middle-income nations. Even with a 3% drop from 2024 levels, 5.4 million people crossed international borders in 2025 to seek safety from persecution and violence.
A deeply concerning long-term trend highlighted in the report is the persistence of protracted displacement: seven out of every 10 refugees worldwide have lived in exile for five years or more, many trapped in overcrowded, under-resourced camps in low-income countries. “Humanitarian assistance has saved lives,” said UNHCR High Commissioner Barham Salih. “But it was never intended to sustain generations of people indefinitely.” To address this systemic issue, UNHCR has set a target to cut by half the number of refugees in protracted displacement who rely on humanitarian aid by 2035.
IDPs make up the largest single segment of the displaced population, totaling 68.7 million globally in 2025. The ongoing conflict in Sudan drove the world’s largest single new wave of displacement, pushing 9.1 million people to flee their homes within the country. Colombia, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan follow Sudan with some of the world’s largest IDP populations.
Looking ahead to 2026, projections offer little reason for optimism. Following the outbreak of conflict in Iran in February 2026, 3.2 million Iranians had been internally displaced by March, and an additional 1 million people were displaced within Lebanon by mid-May. “This is truly unacceptable and we must make sure this doesn’t become a new normal,” Salih emphasized.
The report also tracked returns of displaced people in 2025: 4.4 million refugees returned to their home countries, the second-highest annual number since UNHCR began record-keeping six decades ago. Ninety percent of these returns were concentrated in just three nations: Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan. An additional 10.3 million IDPs also returned to their regions of origin last year. But Salih issued a stark warning that many returns were not voluntary, with returnees facing a lack of basic infrastructure and livable conditions to rebuild their lives. “Voluntary returns to post-conflict Syria and returns under pressure to Afghanistan are not the same thing,” he noted.
Statelessness remains another unresolved crisis, with 4.5 million people around the world currently lacking citizenship of any nation. Myanmar’s Rohingya community make up the largest single stateless group, with most stateless people residing in Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Thailand and Myanmar. Just 46,000 stateless people gained citizenship in 2025, a tiny fraction of the total population in need of this legal status.
Finally, the report highlighted steep cuts to global refugee resettlement: only 82,000 refugees were resettled to new host countries in 2025, down sharply from 188,000 in 2024. Salih noted that this number represents only a tiny fraction of the millions of refugees in need of resettlement, and urged national governments to expand legal pathways for refugee relocation. “Every dangerous sea crossing and every death in the desert represents a failure of the international community,” Salih said. “The human cost of the failure is measured not with statistics but with lives.”