2020s

From top left, clockwise: An N-95 mask used 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; Donald Trump becomes the 47th U.S. president in 2025 after winning a nonconsecutive second term in the 2024 United States presidential election; damage following an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City during the Gaza war; the Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, an AI-generated image authored by Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence application. Significant advances in this field 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]

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 for the first time since the 1970s, and a global supply chain crisis. The World Health Organization declared the virus a global state of emergency from March 2020 to May 2023. While no longer considered a pandemic, many health critics consider the virus' effects to still be ongoing through new variants.

Several anti-government demonstrations and revolts occurred in the early 2020s, including a continuation of those in Hong Kong against extradition legislation; protests against certain local, state and national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic; others around the world, particularly in the United States, against racism and police brutality; one in India against agriculture and farming acts; one in Israel against judicial reforms; another in Indonesia against the omnibus law on jobs; protests and strikes in France against pension reform; political crises in Peru, Bangladesh, Armenia, and Thailand; and many in Belarus, Eswatini, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela against various forms of governmental jurisdiction, corruption, and authoritarianism; along with citizen riots in the United States, Japan, and Brazil in an attempt to overturn election results. The world population grew to over eight billion people, and in 2023, India overtook China as the most populous country in the world.^[4][5] Among democracies in 2024, its elections saw an 80% loss of incumbent support worldwide, several losses being historic. That year, former U.S. president Donald Trump was reelected to a second, nonconsecutive term.

Ongoing military conflicts include the Myanmar civil war, the Ethiopian civil conflict, the Kivu conflict, the Mali War, the Yemeni civil war, the Somali Civil War, Sudanese civil war, the Syrian civil war, the Russo-Ukrainian War, and the Gaza war. The year 2021 saw the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, ending nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan. The Russian invasion of Ukraine became the largest conventional military offensive in Europe since World War II, resulting in a refugee crisis, disruptions to global trade, and an exacerbation of economic inflation. In 2023, a Hamas-led attack marked the first invasion of Israel since 1948, triggering an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory. The invasion has led to the displacement of nearly all 2.3 million 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 the Assad regime. Smaller conflicts include the insurgency in the Maghreb, the Iraq insurgency, the Philippine and the Mexican drug wars.

With multiple extreme weather events magnifying in the 2020s, several world leaders have called it the "decisive decade" for climate action as ecological crises continue to escalate.^[6][7] 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.

There were significant improvements in the complexity of artificial intelligence, with American companies, universities, and research labs pioneering advances in the field.^[8] Generative AI-based applications such as ChatGPT and DALL-E have accumulated over billions of users, and allow users to instantly generate complex texts, images, art, and video, comparable to the sophistication of human work. Other technological advances have also been made, impacting many, such as the widespread use of teleconferencing, online learning, streaming services, 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. 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 the James Webb Space Telescope, Ingenuity helicopter, and Artemis program.^[9][10] Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are being used for remote collaboration, meetings, and training. Contactless payments have become more widespread, offering convenient and secure payment options. Mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which had their roots in the 2010s, have also grown in popularity. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and NFTs, have increased in popularity. This decade has further seen a huge decline in physical media industry, such as DVDs and Blu-ray, with the closure of RedBox and discontinuation of DVDs from Target and Best Buy in 2023-2025. ^{[citation needed]}