A “perfect storm” of overlapping crises forced tens of millions to flee within their own country last year, sending the number of internally displaced people to a record high, monitors said on Thursday.

An unprecedented 71.1 million internally displaced people (IDPs) were registered in 2022 — up 20 percent from a year earlier — amid mass displacement for Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as by the monsoon floods that drenched Pakistan.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, it was around 16.5 million displacements — more than half of them due to conflict, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Ethiopia.

A full 60.9 million new internal displacements were meanwhile reported in 2022, with some people forced to flee multiple times during the year, according to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).