Faced with major security challenges, Europe is preparing to boost its defence capacity. To defend itself against Russia without the United States, Europe needs to rapidly increase spending from the current level of about 2 percent of GDP to an estimated 3.5 percent of GDP – an increase of about €250 billion annually (Burilkov and Wolff, 2025). In March, the European Commission proposed the ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030 1 , which seeks to mobilise €800 billion in defence spending.
Some see increased defence spending as being in conflict with the climate agenda 2 , arguing that boosting defence spending by 1.5 percent of GDP while increasing climate spending by 2 percent of GDP, as required to meet EU climate objectives (Pisani-Ferry and Tagliapietra, 2024), would be unsustainable.
While there will be a trade-off when it comes to public spending – especially in the budgets of countries with more limited fiscal space than Germany, but also in the EU budget itself – the defence and climate agendas are not entirely in conflict. Here, we outline seven major converging interests. These areas should form the basis for a common defence and climate agenda which would allow the EU to develop more coherent policy for the future.
Defence and climate: seven points for a common agendahttps://www.bruegel.org/analysis/defence-and-climate-seven-points-common-agenda