Displacement Change Monitor

What each measure counts

• Refugees under UNHCR's mandate: people recognized as refugees or in refugee-like situations. Palestine refugees under UNRWA's mandate are not included.
• Asylum-seekers: people whose asylum claims were still pending at year-end.
• All needing international protection: refugees, asylum-seekers and "other people in need of international protection," a group UNHCR reports from 2018 onward.
• Internally displaced (IDMC): people displaced by conflict and violence inside their own country, as estimated by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Rows that are not countries

• Unknown origin: not a place. It counts people whose host country did not report where they came from. Changes in it usually reflect how a host government reports, not new movement.
• Stateless: people no state considers its nationals, counted where UNHCR reports them as an origin group.
• Tibetan: UNHCR reports Tibetans as their own origin group, separate from China.
• Territories are labeled with the country that governs them, for example "Puerto Rico, US territory". Hong Kong and Macao are labeled as special administrative regions of China.

Unknown origin, Stateless and Tibetan appear in the table but are not ranked, so they never top a list of countries.

How change is calculated

Every figure is a count on 31 December. Change is the end-year count minus the start-year count. Percentage change is shown only when the start figure is above zero. Ranking by % leaves out countries that started under 1,000 people, so tiny numbers don't top the list.

If either year has no figure, the country is marked unavailable and is not ranked. "Country of origin" counts people by where they fled from. "Host country" counts them by where they live now.

What the arrows show

Each arrow runs from a country of origin to a host country. In "Change" mode, its width is how much that group grew or shrank over the period: red for growth, blue for decline. In "Total at end" mode, its width is the number of people at the end of the period.

Arrows compare year-end counts. They are not counts of journeys. A shrinking corridor can mean returns, moves elsewhere, naturalization or a revised count. Arrows start and end at a reference point inside each country.

Checks on the numbers

Each origin-to-host figure is added up and compared with UNHCR's own published totals.

The ranking flags situations worth a closer look. It is not a full assessment of humanitarian conditions.

Read before relying on a ranking

Large swings can come from how a government counts people, not only from new displacement or returns. In UNHCR's 2025 figures, refugees hosted in Iran fell from 3.49 million to 0.77 million, and people of unknown origin needing international protection rose by about 1.5 million. Check UNHCR's notes before reading a swing like that as movement on the ground.

UNHCR publishes year-end figures once a year, months after the year closes. The newest comparison is therefore at least several months old.

News headlines and which outlets count

Headlines come from GDELT, which tracks news coverage worldwide. Every hour the site reads the latest articles and keeps a headline for 14 days only if all of these hold:

• It is about forced displacement. It mentions refugees, asylum, internally displaced people, statelessness or returnees. Words like "fled" or "evacuated" count only alongside conflict or scale ("fighting", "siege", "millions"), so wildfire evacuations, crime suspects and job "displacement" are left out.
• It names the country it is listed under, or that country's people.
• It is reporting, not a profile or opinion. Stories built around one person, opinion pieces, podcasts and live blogs are left out.
• The outlet is rated reliable and has national or international reach, by public repositories:
  • outlets Wikipedia's Perennial Sources list rates generally reliable;
  • where Wikipedia has not rated an outlet, or rates it reliable only for some sections: a score above 0.66 (of 1) in Lin et al. (2023), which combines six expert news-quality rating sets, and a place among the 10,000 most-visited websites in the Tranco research ranking, which leaves out small local papers;
  • intergovernmental and UN system organizations (.int domains, un.org, UNHCR, WFP and others in the UN system directory).

Outlets Wikipedia never rates generally reliable are always left out. Headlines are still matched automatically and are not checked by this tool. The full outlet list, with the reason each qualifies, is in data/processed/news-sources.json in the repository.

Using figures in a brief

Open a country, or use the world view, and copy the summary from the "Summary for your brief" box. "Copy citation" gives the source line, with the dates the figures cover and when they were retrieved. "Copy link to this view" opens exactly what you see: the same measure, period and country. "Download map (PNG)" saves the map with its title, legend and source for slides.

Sources

• UNHCR Refugee Population Statistics API, the source of every UNHCR figure here
• UNHCR Refugee Data Finder and its methodology
• IDMC Global Internal Displacement Database, published through the UNHCR API
• GDELT 2.0 news files (Global Knowledge Graph)
• Boundaries: Natural Earth via world-atlas. Boundaries and names do not imply endorsement by UNHCR or the project team.

Updates and accessibility

An automatic job runs every hour. It reads the newest GDELT news files and checks whether UNHCR or IDMC have published new or revised figures. Only when they have does it download everything again, rebuild and re-run the checks. If a check fails, the previous data stays up. An open page picks up new headlines every 30 minutes.

The ranking table holds every figure shown on the map, so the dashboard can be used with a keyboard or screen reader. Report problems through the GitHub repository.