More than six million people - half of South Sudan's population - are in need of urgent aid and humanitarian organizations expect the number to rise by 20 to 30 percent in 2017. More people fled the conflict in Syria - 5.5 million - than any other country, but the biggest new source of refugees was what the report called "the disastrous breakdown of peace efforts" in South Sudan.
The figure that includes refugees, asylum seekers and people uprooted inside their own countries was some 300,000 higher at the end of previous year than at the end of 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said.
The South Sudanese conflict has continued to drive people from their homes across the border into Uganda, which now hosts more than 1.2 million refugees, with 960,000 from South Sudan alone.
The figures released ahead of World Refugee Day showed that a full 10.3 million of the world's displaced people fled their homes a year ago alone, including 3.4 million who crossed worldwide borders to become refugees.
This adds up to an huge human cost of war and persecution globally: 65.6 million means that on average one in every 113 people worldwide is today someone who is displaced - a population bigger than that of the world's 21st most populous country, the United Kingdom.
- One person became displaced every three seconds in 2016.
- Almost two-thirds of Syrians have been forced to flee their homes.
Fears of resident in tower block refurbished by Grenfell cladding contractor
He says it may be necessary for numerous outmoded tower blocks built in the 1970s to be demolished because of safety concerns . If the number is confirmed, it would make the Grenfell Tower blaze the deadliest in London since World War Two .
The number of new asylum claims remained high at two million. "We have to do better for these people".
Syria and South Sudan were far from the only countries where people were being uprooted en masse, with Monday's report also pointing to large-scale displacement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan, just to name a few.
- Some 552,200 refugees returned to their countries of origin - more than double the previous year.
Along with the 6.3 million Syrians displaced inside the country, these numbers show that a almost two thirds of all Syrians have been forced from their homes, the report said.
Children, who make up half the world's refugees, continue to bear a disproportionate burden of the suffering, mainly due to their greater vulnerability.
Overall, the refugee population from the world's youngest country swelled 85 percent past year to reach 1.4 million by the end of 2016, the UNHCR report showed.
According to the report, 84 percent of the world's 22.5 million refugees were in low or middle income countries, with a third in the world's least developed nations. It has since exceeded 3 million. These include increased politicization of asylum issues in many countries, and growing restrictions on access to protection measures in some regions, but also positive developments such as the historic summits on Refugees and Migrants in September 2016, the landmark New York Declaration that followed, the new all-of-society approach to managing displacement being pioneered under the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, and the enormous generosity of host countries and donor governments alike towards refugees and other displaced populations.
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