In spring 2020, with Europe in lockdown, a real fear spread among environmental groups: that the economic shock of COVID-19 would push climate policy aside and bury the European Green Deal only months after it was launched. Some governments openly asked for exactly that. The short answer to the question in our title is that the pandemic did not cancel the Green Deal. EU leaders instead tied much of their recovery money to climate goals in July 2020, although the deal has faced growing political pressure since.
This article looks at why the pandemic and the climate crisis were linked in the first place, what was at stake in 2020, what Europe decided and what the experience teaches about green policy in hard times.
How pandemics and environmental damage are connected
The link between COVID-19 and the environment is not mainly about the climate itself. It runs through the way people use land and treat wildlife. When forests are cleared, farms push into wild areas and wild animals are captured, traded and kept close together, the chances grow that a virus will jump from an animal to a human.
That kind of jump is called a zoonosis, and it is common. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about six in ten infectious diseases in people come from animals. A widely cited 2001 study counted 1,415 pathogens known to infect humans and found 61% of them were zoonotic, and research summarised by the WHO puts the share among emerging diseases at up to 75%.
For COVID-19, the leading hypothesis is that the virus spilled over from animals, with bats as the likely original reservoir and wildlife markets in China as a possible route. The exact origin is still debated, and some investigators have not ruled out a research-related accident. Either way, scientists broadly agree that the conditions for animal-to-human spillover are increasing as natural habitats shrink.
The WWF has long ranked the illegal wildlife trade among the biggest direct threats to biodiversity, alongside habitat loss. In 2020, Dimitris Karavellas, director of WWF Greece, warned that humanity was treating nature with growing aggression and that "human health" itself was now at immediate risk.
Climate change adds a further layer. The WHO has warned for years that a warming climate helps spread diseases such as malaria and dengue fever by widening the range of the mosquitoes that carry them.
The warnings that were ignored
None of this was new in 2020. Ecologists, public health experts and economists had warned for decades that destroying ecosystems carries a price that eventually shows up in human lives and budgets. Yet spending on pandemic preparedness, public health research and environmental protection was often treated as a cost to be trimmed rather than an investment.
The argument made in this article when it first appeared still holds: even a small slice of the emergency money spent in 2020 would have gone a long way if invested earlier in hospitals, virus surveillance in wildlife and healthier ecosystems. Prevention is cheap compared with a crisis that stops the world economy.
Counting the cost of climate change in money
When economies are in trouble, governments find enormous sums quickly. The United States signed the CARES Act on 27 March 2020, a stimulus package worth about $2.2 trillion, and the European Central Bank launched large-scale support for banks and markets.
Climate change has its own price tag, but it arrives slowly, so it is easier to ignore. The European Commission's PESETA research project has tried to put numbers on it. Figures from the project quoted in 2020 suggested that, without action, heat-related deaths alone could cost the EU around €13 billion a year in the period 2011–2040, rising to roughly €50 billion a year by the end of the century, based on a statistical value of about €59,000 per year of life lost. Estimates of this kind are uncertain and are revised regularly, but they all point the same way: inaction is expensive.
Putting a value on human lives sounds cold, yet it is how policy makers compare the cost of acting with the cost of doing nothing. The uncomfortable lesson of 2020 is that we are much better at paying for emergencies than at paying to avoid them.
The 2020 fight over the European Green Deal
The European Commission presented the Green Deal on 11 December 2019. Its central goal is to make the EU climate neutral by 2050, with an interim target, later written into the European Climate Law, of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 compared with 1990.
Only three months later the pandemic hit. Lockdowns briefly cleared the air in many cities and cut emissions, but the drop came from a collapsing economy, not a cleaner one, and was never going to last.
Some politicians argued that Europe could no longer afford its climate ambitions. Polish and Czech leaders, among others, called for the Green Deal to be paused or dropped. On the other side, seventeen EU governments urged that it should be the backbone of the recovery, and the European Parliament asked for it to be built into the recovery plan. Supporters argued that renewable energy, building renovation and clean transport were exactly the labour-heavy investments a stalled economy needed.
Why green policies are the first to be cut in a crisis
There was good reason to worry. After the 2008 financial crisis, several European countries weakened or delayed environmental rules in the name of growth, and environmental budgets were among the first to shrink. Greece, which went through a deep recession, saw some of these pressures first-hand.
The pattern is understandable. Jobs and incomes are urgent; climate damage feels distant. But treating the two as a choice is a false dilemma. Rebuilding an economy on the same fuels and habits simply postpones the bill.
This article originally quoted David Attenborough saying that anyone who believes in endless growth on a finite planet is either mad or an economist. Attenborough has repeated the line, but it is usually attributed to the economist Kenneth Boulding, who is said to have used it in the 1970s; its original wording and setting are hard to pin down.
What the EU decided in July 2020
Europe's leaders answered the question in this article's title at a special summit that ended on 21 July 2020. They agreed a combined package of €1,824.3 billion: the €1,074.3 billion EU budget for 2021–2027 plus €750 billion in jointly borrowed recovery funds called Next Generation EU, split into about €390 billion in grants and €360 billion in loans.
Crucially, they committed 30% of total spending to climate-related projects. Later negotiations with the European Parliament went further for the recovery money: each country's national recovery plan must devote at least 37% of its spending to climate goals. In other words, the pandemic recovery became one of the main ways the Green Deal was funded.
Further laws followed. The European Climate Law made the 2050 neutrality goal binding, and in July 2021 the Commission presented the "Fit for 55" package, which includes the rule that new cars sold in the EU should be zero-emission from 2035.
Where things stand, and what to take from it
The Green Deal survived the pandemic, but it has not had an easy ride. Farmer protests in 2024 led several governments, including Poland's, to push for changes, and the Nature Restoration Law only passed after a long fight before entering into force in August 2024. Scientists continue to warn that deeper cuts will be needed after 2030.
A few lessons stand out:
- Health and environment are one issue. Protecting forests and controlling the wildlife trade is pandemic prevention, not just conservation.
- Crisis spending can be green spending. The 2020 recovery showed that emergency money can be steered towards long-term goals if leaders choose to.
- Short-term emission drops are not progress. Lockdown skies were clearer because life stopped, not because the system changed.
- Myth to drop: that climate action and economic recovery are rivals. Most of the EU's recovery strategy was built on the idea that they belong together.
The pandemic did not change the climate, but it did test Europe's commitment to dealing with it. In 2020 that commitment held. Whether it keeps holding as new crises arrive is the question for the years ahead.
Sources: CDC: Zoonotic diseases shared between animals and people (2019); Wikipedia: Zoonosis; Wikipedia: CARES Act; Wikipedia: European Green Deal; Wikipedia: Next Generation EU; EEAS: Main results of the Special European Council (21 July 2020); Wikipedia: Kenneth E. Boulding.
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