2020s

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From top left, clockwise: a crowded temporary hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 became a global pandemic in 2020 and dominated the early part of the decade, as it was deemed an international public health emergency until 2023; a Ukrainian tank driving in the Donetsk region during the Russo-Ukrainian War; a U.S. plane carries passengers out of Afghanistan during the 2021 fall of Kabul at the end of the War in Afghanistan; in 2024, rebels in Syria celebrate the fall of the Assad regime that had ruled for 54 years; damage following an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City during the Gaza war; a significant AI boom happened in the early 2020s, with services such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek being used by billions worldwide.

The 2020s (pronounced "twenty-twenties" or "two thousand [and] twenties"; shortened to "the '20s" and also known as "The Twenties") is the current decade that began on 1 January 2020, and will end on 31 December 2029.^[1][2]

That is if the world doesn't end before that date

The 2020s began with the COVID-19 pandemic. The first reports of the virus were published on 31 December 2019, though the first cases are said to have appeared nearly a month earlier.^[3] The pandemic led to a global economic recession, a sustained rise in global inflation, and a global supply chain crisis. The World Health Organization declared the virus a global state of emergency from March 2020 to May 2023.

Many anti-government demonstrations and revolts occurred in the early 2020s, including in Hong Kong, India, Israel, Indonesia, France, Peru, Bangladesh, Armenia, and Thailand. Protests against certain local, state and national responses to COVID-19 took place, as well as protests, particularly in the United States, against racism and police brutality. There were many protests in Belarus, Eswatini, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, Serbia, and Turkey against various forms of governmental jurisdiction, corruption, and authoritarianism; along with citizen riots in the United States and Brazil attempting to overturn election results. Among democracies in 2024, its elections saw an 80% loss of incumbent support worldwide, including several significant losses.

Ongoing military conflicts include those in Myanmar, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. The year 2021 saw the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, ending a nearly 20 years of war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in a refugee crisis, disruptions to global trade, and an exacerbation of economic inflation. In 2023, a Hamas-led attack on Israel triggered an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory. The invasion has led to the displacement of nearly all Gaza residents, a humanitarian crisis, a famine, and a polio epidemic, sparking global protests against Israel. In 2024, a quick and renewed rebel offensive during the Syrian civil war led to the toppling of Bashar al-Assad and the fall of his regime. In 2025, Israel launched airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, triggering a brief a direct conflict between the two. Smaller conflicts include the insurgency in the Maghreb, the Iraq insurgency, the conflict between India and Pakistan, and the Philippine and the Mexican drug wars.

With multiple extreme weather events and ecological crises continuing to escalate, several world leaders have called the 2020s the "decisive decade" for climate action.^[4][5] The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season became the most active on record, featuring 31 cyclones. In February 2023, a series of powerful earthquakes killed up to 62,000 people in Turkey and Syria; this event fell within the top five deadliest earthquakes of the 21st century. The years 2023 and 2024 both broke yearly global temperature records, with 2024 breaching 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Technology has continued to evolve in the 2020s. There were breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, with American companies, universities, and research labs pioneering advances in the field.^[6] Generative AI-based applications, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E, allow users to instantly generate sophisticated texts, images, art, and video. Other technological advances include the widespread use of teleconferencing, online learning, e-commerce and food delivery services to compensate for lockdowns ordered by governments around the world during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Streaming services, such as Disney+ and Max, have increased in popularity during the decade; physical media, such as Redbox and DVDs, and cable television have continued to fall out of usage. Several popular social media applications, like Threads, BeReal, Clubhouse, Bluesky, Gettr, and Truth Social, launched, continuing progress in digital technology. 5G networks launched around the globe at the start of the decade and became prevalent in smartphones. Research into outer space further progressed in the 2020s, with the United States mainly dominating space exploration, including with the James Webb Space Telescope, Ingenuity helicopter, and Artemis program.^[7][8] Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are being used for remote collaboration, meetings, and training. Contactless payments, including mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, have grown in popularity. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and NFTs, have also increased in popularity.

During this decade, the world population grew from 7.7 billion to over eight billion people. In 2023, India overtook China as the most populous country in the world.^[9][10]