The United Nations refugee agency reported on Thursday that forced displacement due to conflict or persecution declined in 2025 for the first time in ten years. However, the agency cautioned that the total of 118 million people who have fled their homes or countries remains alarmingly high.
The UNHCR's Global Trends Report provides a detailed breakdown of the numbers: at the end of 2025, 117 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict, violence, or persecution. This figure includes refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and others requiring international protection.
The decline marks a historic shift, driven by an increase in returns and the acquisition of citizenship by many refugees in host countries, according to Tarek Abou Chabake, the agency's chief statistician.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Barham Salih, emphasized that the number of displaced people, mostly due to conflict, is unacceptably high. Among the 41.6 million refugees last year, a significant percentage were children.
While Colombia, Germany, and Turkey each hosted over 2 million refugees, the majority reside in low- to middle-income countries. Despite a 3% drop from the previous year, 5.4 million people crossed international borders in 2025 seeking refuge.
Seven out of ten refugees have lived in exile for five years or more, often confined to sprawling camps in impoverished nations. Salih noted that humanitarian assistance has saved lives but was never intended to sustain generations indefinitely.
The agency aims to halve the number of refugees in protracted displacement who depend on aid by 2035.
Internally, 7 million people were displaced within their own countries last year. The ongoing war in Sudan caused the largest internal displacement, with 9.1 million people forced to flee.
Colombia, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan also have large displaced populations. Projections for 2026 remain grim: the Iran war, which erupted in February, displaced 3.2 million people inside Iran by March, and by mid-May, 1 million were displaced within Lebanon.
Salih called this situation truly unacceptable and urged the international community to prevent it from becoming the new normal.
Three countries—Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan—accounted for 90% of the 4.4 million refugees who returned home in 2025, the second-highest number since UNHCR began records six decades ago. Additionally, 3 million internally displaced people returned to their areas of origin.
However, Salih warned that many returns occurred under pressure and without basic infrastructure for a dignified life, contrasting voluntary returns to post-conflict Syria with returns under pressure to Afghanistan.
The report also highlighted stateless populations, with the Rohingya from Myanmar being the largest group, mostly living in Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Thailand, and Myanmar. Only 46,000 stateless people acquired citizenship in 2025.
Refugee resettlement numbers fell sharply to 188,000 in 2025, down from the previous year. Salih urged governments to expand legal pathways for refugees, stating that every dangerous sea crossing and death in the desert represents a failure of the international community, measured not in statistics but in lives.