Independent review of the humanitarian response to internal displacement

Executive summary 

Internal displacement has risen dramatically since the United Nations (UN) first began to draw attention to this issue in 1992, when there were an estimated 24 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) (UN, 1992). Today, there are more than three times that number, with the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reporting 71 million IDPs at the end of 2022 and millions more in 2023 due to several escalating conflicts and many large-scale disasters (IDMC, 2023a; b).1 Far from slowing, this trend is accelerating at an alarming rate, driven not only by conflict, generalised violence and sudden-onset disasters but also increasingly by water scarcity, drought and food insecurity due to climate change. Indeed, it’s estimated that climate change could lead to over 200 million people moving within their own borders by 2050 (Clement et al., 2021). The forecast, therefore, suggests internal displacement on an ever-more worrying scale.

Findings 

The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) humanitarian system is not responding effectively to the global crisis of internal displacement. This has been broadly true for the past 30 years and, despite certain improvements, remains the case today. All six case studies for this review highlight serious shortcomings, as have countless studies, system reviews and UN reform processes. The UN Secretary-General (UNSG)’s Action Agenda on Internal Displacement tells us ‘more of the same is not good enough’. 

While IDPs are the responsibility of affected states, the IASC system is critical when governments are unable or unwilling to respond. Yet, fundamentally, the IASC humanitarian system is too often:

• too slow to respond 
• not joined up, if and when it does respond 
• overlooking IDPs’ specific needs 
• focused more on internal processes than meaningfully engaging the people it aims to help 
• too slow to help IDPs get their lives back on track. 

The fact that IDPs suffer higher mortality and worse health outcomes in humanitarian emergencies than any other population group shows that the system needs serious improvement. 

This is also true for protection, the lack of which compels many people to flee in the first place and often stands in the way of safe and durable solutions to their displacement. Moreover, both in conflict and disasters, displacement heightens exposure to protection risks, especially for women, children, persons with disabilities, older persons and minorities. The protection of IDPs and other 1 IDMC (2023) reports figures as of end 2022. Global IDP figures for 2023 will be available in Spring 2024. 10 HPG report civilians is a long-recognised policy commitment of the IASC but one that it struggles to fulfil in practice. Human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law by states and non-state actors need to be documented and challenged. But even where a lack of humanitarian assistance is exacerbating protection risks, as in case studies for this review, too little is being done.