2006
year
2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2006th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 6th year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 7th year of the 2000s decade.
2006 was designated as the International Year of Deserts and Desertification.
Population
The world population on January 1, 2006, was estimated to be 6.629 billion people and increased to 6.714 billion people by January 1, 2007. An estimated 138.5 million births and 53.3 million deaths took place in 2006. The average global life expectancy was 68.6 years, an increase of 0.5 years from 2005.
The estimated number of global refugees increased from 8.65 million to 9.88 million by the end of the year, marking an end to several years of declining rates. The number of refugees from Iraq increased by about 1.2 million, and the global number also increased by 464,000 after a change to how the United Nations counted refugees that resided in the United States. Afghanistan remained the largest source of refugees with 2.1 million people.
Conflicts
There were 32 conflicts in 2006 that resulted in at least 25 fatalities, all of which were intrastate conflicts fought by violent non-state actors. Five resulted in at least 1,000 fatalities: the Iraqi insurgency, Eelam War IV in Sri Lanka, the Chadian Civil War, and the Sudanese War in Darfur.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2006” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “year” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2021. The Library of Congress control number is sh2010010159. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2007 and 2005.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “2006”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 2006 primary sources, 2006 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “2006” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.