The world is rolling backward, and at a disturbingly faster pace, in the struggle to limit carnage from land mines and other booby-trap explosives. The most recent numbers, covering 2016, are appalling.

Known casualties that year came to 8,605, including 2,089 deaths, according to a new report by Landmine Monitor, a research arm of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The toll was nearly 25 percent higher than the 6,967 maimed and dead counted a year earlier, and more than double the 3,993 in 2014. And these numbers are almost assuredly an undercount. “In some states and areas, numerous casualties go unrecorded,” Landmine Monitor said.

Much of the 2016 mayhem stemmed from conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine and Yemen, but people in 56 countries and other areas were killed or wounded by improvised explosive devices and other ordnance placed by governments or, more commonly, by insurgent groups. The sheer indecency of it is self-evident. Nearly 80 percent of the victims were civilians; children accounted for 42 percent of civilian casualties in situations where the ages were known.

One subset of the menace, cluster munitions, is singularly vicious. A single cluster bomb can contain dozens, even hundreds, of baseball-size bomblets that spray in all directions, ripping apart anything in their path. All too often, they fail to detonate right away and thus become time bombs that imperil unwary civilians who pick them up, including curious children. Cluster munitions alone caused 971 known casualties in 2016, more than twice the toll of the previous year, according to Cluster Munition Monitor. Most victims were Syrians, nearly all of them civilians, but Saudi Arabia has also used American-supplied cluster bombs in Yemen.