By the end of May 2025, nearly 300 million people around the world were in urgent need of humanitarian assistance and protection. In the first months of the year, conflicts and violence intensified in multiple countries—deepening needs and driving many people to the brink of death—while natural disasters wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people.
Conflict and violence: multiple crises were characterized by systematic violations of international humanitarian law, including mass atrocities, with catastrophic consequences for civilians.
- Forced displacement—primarily driven by conflict—reached its highest ever levels. The number of people forced to flee persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order rose in 2024, reaching a record 123.2 million people, or one in 67 people globally. This included 83.4 million people who remained internally displaced within their own country as a consequence of conflicts and natural disasters, a 12 per cent increase compared to 2023. In 2025, refugees continued to flee crises—particularly Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Myanmar and Sudan—and internal displacement rose rapidly. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) , hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were repeatedly forcibly displaced and confined into ever-shrinking spaces. Haiti is seeing record levels of displacement due to violence, with nearly 1.3 million people now internally displaced, a 24 per cent increase since December 2024. In the DRC, the M23 offensive in the east of the country, beginning in January 2025, displaced over a million people. In Burkina Faso, over 60,000 people were internally displaced in April alone and in Colombia, over 50,000 people were displaced in just two weeks due to the Catatumbo crisis. With every displacement, urgent shelter needs arise. Shelter is a foundation for survival—without it, people remain exposed to violence, disease, and exploitation. Despite 40 per cent of IDPs globally still residing in displacement sites, the support provided to these locations is minimal.
Kassala, Sudan
Since renewed fighting that began in late 2024, 400 families continue to live in the Omar Haj Musa site for internally displaced persons—a former school. Despite their resilience, continued fighting and underfunding of humanitarian action means that sorely needed aid may not reach those who need it most.
OCHA/ Giles Clarke- The global food security crisis escalated dramatically, with 295.3 million people facing high acute food insecurity. Conflict and/or insecurity was responsible for Catastrophic food insecurity (Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) 5) in Haiti, Mali, OPT, South Sudan and Sudan, as well as famine in 10 locations in Sudan and famine-risk across all of Gaza, OPT. Conflict also caused food insecurity to significantly deteriorate in Myanmar, Nigeria and Sudan, and drove malnutrition crises in Mali, OPT (Gaza), Sudan and Yemen.
- Sexual violence was rampant, particularly against women and girls. In the DRC, it was estimated that a child is raped every half hour; in Haiti, there was a tenfold increase in sexual violence against children between 2023 and 2024; in Sudan, the scale and brutality of sexual violence escalated, and around 12.1 million people—nearly one in four, most of them women and girls—are now at risk of gender-based violence.
- The horrifying toll of war on children continued to mount, with 50,000 children reportedly killed or injured in Gaza, OPT between October 2023 and May 2025, and April 2025 marking the deadliest month for children in Ukraine in nearly three years. In Colombia, more than 46,000 children and adolescents in the Catatumbo region are facing alarming risks, including fear of forced recruitment into non-State armed groups due to escalating conflict in 2025.
- Attacks against health care disrupted vital and life-saving care for millions of people throughout the first months of 2025, with over 500 attacks recorded—over 300 of which involved the use of heavy weapons—across 13 countries and territories.
- The use of explosive weapons in urban areas caused devastating harm for civilians and impacted services essential for their survival, including in Myanmar, OPT, Sudan, Ukraine and Yemen. It is estimated that some 50 million people suffer the horrific consequences of urban warfare worldwide.
Kyiv, Ukraine
A family in their 80s, Viktor and Nadiia, reel from an attack in their neighbourhood: “We woke up in the middle of the night to the deafening sound of an explosion. It felt as if the entire building shook. Glass was everywhere, and everything in our apartment had been turned upside down. The wall between our apartment and our neighbor’s collapsed. It’s a miracle that we are alive today." Within an hour, volunteers and rescue services arrived to help them.
OCHA/Viktoriia Andriievska.Climate and geological crises: Two major natural disasters occurred in the first half of 2025. On 28 March 2025, two earthquakes struck central Myanmar, killing 3,800 people, injuring 51,000, destroying thousands of homes and disrupting communications, water access and electricity supply. The disaster exacerbated an already dire humanitarian situation in the country where, prior to the earthquake, nearly 20 million people were already in need of humanitarian assistance. Meanwhile, in Mozambique, Tropical Cyclone Dikeledi made landfall on 13 January 2025, just a month after Tropical Cyclone Chido on 15 December 2024. The two cyclones impacted 700,000 people and destroyed approximately 150,000 homes, as well as hundreds of schools and health facilities. The risk of major emergencies continues to rise due to the global climate crisis, with 2024 now confirmed as the warmest year on record, while 2015 to 2024 are all in the ‘Top Ten’. And the future is bleak: there is an 80 per cent chance that at least one year between 2025 and 2029 will be hotter than 2024.
Nampula Province, Mozambique
In January 2025, Cyclone Dikeledi made landfall, destroying over 15,000 houses and 100 schools in the north of the country, including the Ilha de Moçambique Secondary School. More than 700,000 people have been affected by cyclones Chido and Dikeledi.
OCHA/ Ruth Matahelumual.References
- Data as of 3 June 2025.