The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Thursday that its latest Global Trends Reports found that forced displacement was currently affecting one per cent of humanity, or one in every 97 people. 

The refugee agency appealed to countries "to do far more to find homes for millions of refugees and others displaced by conflict, persecution or events seriously disturbing public order". 

The report was released ahead of World Refugee Day, on June 20. It showed that 79.5-million were displaced by the end of 2019. 

The UNHCR had never seen a higher total, it said. 

"The report also notes diminishing prospects for refugees when it comes to hopes of any quick end to their plight. In the 1990s, on average 1.5 million refugees were able to return home each year. Over the past decade that number has fallen to around 390 000 globally, meaning that growth in displacement is today far outstripping solutions," said commissioner Filippo Grandi. 

“We are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon."

People could not be be expected to live in a state of upheaval for years on end, he said, without a chance of going home, or a hope of building a future where they were. 

The world needed a new and more accepting attitude towards those who fled, coupled with a much more determined drive to unlock ongoing conflicts, which were at the root of "such immense suffering".

The report showed that of the 79.5-million who were displaced at the end of last year, 45.7-million were people who had fled to other areas of their own countries. 

The rest were people displaced elsewhere, 4.2-million of them being those awaiting the outcome of asylum requests, while 29.6-million were refugees and others forcibly displaced outside their countries.

The UNHCR said the annual increase, from a figure of 70.8-million at the end of 2018, was a result of two main factors. 

The first was the "new displacement" in 2019, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sahel, Yemen and Syria. 

Syria is currently in its tenth year of conflict, and accounts for 13.2-million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people, "fully a sixth of the world’s total".

The second reason for the increase was due to "a better presentation of the situation of Venezuelans outside their country, many of whom are not legally registered as refugees or asylum-seekers, but for whom protection - sensitive arrangements - are required".