The most obvious place to start is the website for the U.N. refugee agency or UNHCR. The UNHCR 2006 Global Trends report was updated in mid 2007. The UNHCR Asylum Levels and Trends 2006 is useful if you're looking at the numbers and nationalities of people applying for asylum.

For more on who is and is not a refugee see this UNHCR page. The UNHCR has also put together this quick media guide to definitions of refugees and asylum seekers.

The United Nations has a separate agency for Palestinians called the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees.

For news and features on refugees and displacement see AlertNet's coverage of World Refugee Day 2008.

A good source of story ideas is Forced Migration Review which carries readable non-academic articles on a broad range of topics.

One of the best places to get information on internally displaced people (IDPs) is the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. It gives sourced estimates along with information and analysis. This IDMC table gives country by country displacement figures.

The IDMC was set up by the Norwegian Refugee Council - an independent non-governmental organisation helping refugees and internally displaced people.

The International Organization for Migration promotes international cooperation on migration issues and provides humanitarian assistance.

International Rescue Committee does a lot of work with refugees and IDPs. And the Women's Commission, which works under the auspices of the IRC, has numerous reports on refugee women and children.

There's a good article in the New York Times on the problems faced by Iraqi refugee women who have fled to Syria and how many have to resort to prostitution.

The obvious caveats apply to any information on Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia compiled by readers, but it gives a readable introduction to refugees and has a section on women and children.

For more on environmental migrants Christian Aid issued a report in 2007 entitled Human tide: The real migration crisis.

AlertNet has put together this FAQ: Six questions about climate refugees.

And this feature Climate refugees in political pass-the-parcel looks at the Tuvalu Pacific islanders who could lose much of their land in the coming decades.