The hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into Europe this summer are a small fraction of the total displaced population around the world.
War and persecution have forced a record number of people worldwide to flee their homes, according to a June report from the United Nations Refugee Agency. The rapid increase in recent years has been largely fueled by the ongoing war in Syria, according to the report, which is “now the world’s single-largest driver of displacement.”
By the end of 2014,there were nearly 59.5 million displaced people worldwide, the UN reported — up from 51.2 in 2013 — the biggest single-year leap on record. 13.9 million people were displaced in 2014 alone, four times as many as the previous year. The majority of this population remain internally displaced (within their own countries.)
Meanwhile, 19.5 million of the displaced population in 2014 were considered “refugees” by the UN (up from 16.7 million in 2013), an internationally recognized classification for people forced to flee their countries because of armed conflict or persecution. As laid out by the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees are classified as distinct from migrants, and the majority are eligible for protection and assistance from the UN and, to a varying degree, its member states (each nation has distinct ways of admitting and serving refugee populations).
The Refugee Project, featured below, is an interactive map of refugee migrations around the world every year since 1975. Created by design firm Hyperakt, the project uses UN data and only includes legal, registered refugees under UN protection (not the millions of economic migrants and undocumented populations around the world). Circles around each country expand and contract as the flow of refugees grows or slows, and a heatmap at the bottom shows the change in population over time. Radiating lines point to where refugees have found asylum. It also includes short histories of major refugee crises over the last four decades. Not included, however, are figures beyond 2012, and therefore the interactive doesn’t fully reflect the extent of the current refugee crisis in Europe.