countries experienced 44 per cent of disasters but suffered 68 per cent of deaths. This demonstrates that levels of economic development, rather than exposure to hazards per se, are major determinants of mortality. Rise in conflicts within borders pushes civilian death toll upward
Today, about ONE IN THREE refugees resides in a camp. Two in three live in urban areas
Today 1 BILLION PEOPLE or about 14 per cent of the world’s population live in areas of conflict
74%
Photo © Panos Pictures/Mikkel Ostergaard
The Second World War, the largest conflict in the modern world, remains humanity’s reference point for mass harm. About 3 per cent of the world’s people died as a direct result of that conflict or its prelude and aftermath. Meanwhile, more than one third of the world’s people were affected by it. For each death, therefore, 10 other lives were radically disrupted. After the Second World War, the number of international conflicts declined dramatically, while conflicts within national boundaries and wars of decolonization increased in the 1950s and 1960s. The increase in intra-State conflicts and the decrease in international wars help explain an increase in civilian deaths and a decrease in deaths among combatants. Regardless of whether a conflict occurs within or across a national boundary, it invariably has an insidious impact on the lives of many people, through chronic insecurity and uncertainty, which in turn affect the quality of life, social cohesion, livelihoods, rights and development potential for all. At the end of the Second World War, 940 million people—or 40 per cent of the world’s population at that time—lived in areas of conflict. By 1956, the number fell precipitously to 210 million, or 8 per cent of the world’s population. Afterward, the number continued to rise, reaching about 1 billion people today (Garfield et al., 2012).
Seventy-four per cent of direct conflict deaths between 1989 and 2008 occurred in Central Africa, East Africa, the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia
THE STATE OF WORLD POPULATION 2015
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