18 Oct Infographics: Refugees

Where do refugees come from? Where do they go? Which countries produce the most refugees? Which countries take the most in?

Christian Behrens, a German designer who studied at Concordia, answers those questions visually with a series of interactive infographics that grew out of a Potsdam University of Applied Sciences class project on mapping global tendencies.

Based on the annual Refugee Report of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the graphic lets us look at refugee flows from several different perspectives.

Which country took in the most refugees in 2008? The US? Nope. Canada? Not even close. Pakistan tops the list, at 1,780,150.  Iran, Jordan, Germany, and Syria each take in many more people in flight than the US and Canada combined. Here’s Syria, which took in 1,104,523 refugees in 2008, mostly from Iraq, but also from the Gaza Strip and Somalia:

Don’t waste your time with these screenshots. Check out the interactive versions.

From Fastcodesign, via Costas Halavrezos and Gillian Barfoot.