Disaster displacement ravaging the globe.

• Position: Worldview

In the last seven years, an estimated one person every second has been displaced by a disaster, with more than 19,000,000 people forced to flee their homes in 2014 alone. Disaster displacement is on the rise and, as policy leaders worldwide advance towards the adoption of a post-2015 global agenda, the time never has been better to address it.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council has released its global report, which reveals how, in 2014, 17,500,000 people were forced to flee their homes by disasters brought on by weather-related hazards, such as floods and storms, and 1,700,000 by geophysical hazards, such as earthquakes. China, India, and the Philippines have experienced the highest levels of displacement in absolute terms since 2008.

Contrary to common assumptions, displacement following disasters can become protracted and returning home is not always an option. A sample of 34 cases accounts for over 715,000 people in such situations. Monitoring of protracted displacement situations is scarce, resulting in an important blind spot in our current understanding of disaster displacement.

"The millions of lives devastated by disasters is more often a consequence of ill-conceived manmade infrastructures and policies, rather than the forces of mother nature," says Jan Egeland, secretary general of NRC. "A flood is not in itself a disaster, the...