Earlier this year the UNHCR released one of their Global Trends Report that is a must-read. Wars, conflict and persecution have forced more people than at any other time since records began to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere. The report said the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago.

Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest. “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.

Most alarmingly, however, it showed that over half the world’s refugees are children.

The full Global Trends report with this information and more, and including data on individual countries, demographics, numbers of people returning to their countries, and available estimates of stateless population is available at http://unhcr.org/556725e69.html.