- A record 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2016 - more than the population of Britain - and an increase of 300,000 over the previous year.
Around half a million other refugees were able to return to their home countries, and about 6.5 million internally displaced people to their areas of origin, although many did so in less than ideal circumstances and facing uncertain prospects.
The UN said it hoped Monday's record breaking numbers of displaced would encourage wealthy countries to think again: not just to accept more refugees, but to invest in peace promotion, and reconstruction.
One person became displaced every three seconds in 2016.
There are also more than 375,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Rakhine, Kachin and northern Shan states as well as in southeast Myanmar, according to the spokesperson.
Worldwide, 84 percent refugees were in low- or middle-income countries as of end of 2016, with one in every three (4.9 million people) being hosted by the least developed countries.
Within this appeal, UNICEF operations require almost $50 million in 2017 as well as $30 million each year from 2018-2020 to provide critical health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education, early childhood development, adolescent development, and child protection interventions, for both refugee and host community children. "More than 2,000 people are reported to have died or gone missing since the start of the year", said UNHCR spokesperson Cécile Pouilly. The statistics reflect dire situations in countries such as Syria, which has been ravaged by a six-year civil war, and South Sudan, which, the United Nations report states, has suffered from a "disastrous breakdown of peace efforts".
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Over 900,000 refugees from South Sudan are sheltering in Uganda.
The UN refugee chief meanwhile voiced alarm over the rapidly deteriorating situation in South Sudan, calling it the world's "fastest growing refugee crisis and displacement crisis".
Grandi said there were outstanding examples in villages, towns and cities in countries on every continent where refugees had been welcomed.
The ranking does not include the 5.3 million registered Palestinian refugees.
Conflict and violence led to more displacements of people in countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine. Most returned to Afghanistan. These incidents are a reminder of the grave dangers that people confront when forced to flee their countries because of war and persecution. There were another 2.8 million asylum seekers, the report said. Pakistan comes second with a total refugee population of 1,505,525 followed by Lebanon which hosts 1,154,040 refugees mainly from Syria.
Today we live in a world in which uncertainty often abounds; economic instability, political upheaval and violence close to home can make us want to shut our eyes or close our doors.
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