The European Union strengthened its environmental policies this week with adoption of a nature restoration law that member countries hope will help them meet climate and biodiversity targets set under the 2015 Paris Agreement and a global biodiversity agreement reached late last year.

The European Parliament on Wednesday narrowly voted for the nature restoration law with support from traditional center and center-left parties, including Social Democrats and Greens, as well as a few votes from center-right and liberal market-based parties.

Opposition to the law coalesced around the large center-right European People’s Party bloc, which allied itself with far-right and nationalist parties to try and derail the law with a fact-free propaganda campaign that included demonstrably false statements, including claims that the law would force villages to be abandoned and threaten food security.

“The research and peer-reviewed studies that shaped the new nature restoration law make it clear those targets can’t be reached without repairing damaged ecosystems, and without changing the trajectory of the European economy to a direction where it gives back to nature more than it takes,” said EU Commission environmental spokesperson Adalbert Jahnz.

In another exchange, a conservative member of parliament called the nature restoration law a “Crazy environmental plan which is destroying agriculture and creating even more pollution,” to which a supporter of the law responded, “I’m a farmer. You know what threatens food sovereignty? What threatens farming and farm revenue is using more pesticides and using more artificial fertilizers.”