Internal displacement continues to rise at an alarming pace, with an estimated 83.4 million people living in displacement globally at the end of 2024 (IDMC, 2025). As crises become more frequent, complex, and overlapping, humanitarian actors face growing pressure to generate timely, reliable, and actionable insights on population movements to inform preparedness, response, and recovery.

Digital trace data — such as anonymised Call Detail Records (CDRs), GPS-enabled mobile phone data, satellite imagery, and aggregated social media usage statistics — offer new opportunities to complement traditional displacement data systems. When responsibly integrated, these data can improve the timeliness, spatial resolution, and coverage of movement estimates, particularly in rapidly evolving, insecure, or access-constrained contexts. At the same time, significant challenges remain, including methodological uncertainty, bias and representativeness, interoperability with existing humanitarian systems, ethical and privacy safeguards, and barriers to operational uptake.

This in-person roundtable will bring together organizations at the forefront of producing digital trace analyses alongside those using or seeking to integrate these insights into humanitarian decision-making. Moving beyond high-level discussions, the session will focus on concrete use cases, practical trade-offs, and lessons learned from applying digital trace data to real-world displacement and mobility estimation across humanitarian, public health, and crisis response settings.

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