Last year, 70.8 million people were forced to leave their homes due to war.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) annual Global Trends report shows that's 2.8 million more people than 2017.
The report looks at three main groups of people: refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people (IDPs).
Refugees are people whose claims for asylum have been formally recognized. The year 2018 saw 25.9 million refugees worldwide. Half of them were children under 18.
It should be noted that two thirds of all refugees came from just five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia.
UNHCR Regional representation spokeswoman Catherine Stubberfield said that the UNHCR is facing an increased number of refugees under its mandate.
"What we've seen since 2012 is that the number of refugees under the UNHCR's mandate have actually doubled and the reasons for that are multiple. On the one hand we've seen major new crisis in places like Venezuela, but at the sametime we've also seen older crises, like the conflict in Syria, still ongoing and not resolved. So, fundamentally more people have been displaced, less people have been able to go home and that does create an increased need for resettlement places."
Children in the al-Hol camp in Syria. Source: AP
Last year Australia took 12,200 refugees.
The CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia, Paul Power, stressed that Australia is capable of accepting more refugees and said that the country needs to accept the role refugees have played in shaping of Australian Society.
‘’More than 880,000 refugees have come to Australia over 75 years and many Australians have either been refugees or have a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent who was a refugee. So it is very much a part of the Australian experience and yet so much of the political rhetoric that we hear about refugees suggests that refugees are some outside threat to the Australian nation. Really when you look at postwar experience of Australia, refugees and migrants have played a very significant role and it's really time we recognise that as a nation."
At the end of 2018, there were also 3.5 million asylum-seekers, 1.7 million more than the previous year.
Asylum seekers are people who have left their home country and have applied for refugee status.
Of the 2.1 million individual asylum requests made in 2018, one in five was someone from Venezuela. Over 3 million Venezuelans fled their homes because of the civil unrest last year, with nearly 342,000 making asylum requests.
There were also 41.3 million internally displaced people in 2018. These are people who were forced from their homes, but who haven’t left the country.
Venezuelans cross illegally into Colombia near the Simon Bolivar International Bridge, close to Cucuta, Colombia. Source: AAP
The Highest number of internally displaced people can be found in Colombia, followed by Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
On a final note, Ms Stubberfield says, nations must also work on being more accepting of displaced people.
‘’Until those root causes of conflict and human rights violations and persecution have been addressed and permanent solutions have been found, we really do need to work together to support refugees, to make sure they have the kind of assistance and pathways for the future that we would all need if we were forced to flee our homes."
