Repost from the original press release
ComAct – Community Tailored Actions for Energy Poverty Mitigation is a new project that started in October 2020. Financed by Horizon2020, ComAct is set to lift people in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union republics out of energy poverty.
Background of the ComAct project
Energy poverty represents a problem all over Europe and is particularly high in the East, South, South-Eastern and Baltic regions of Europe. In most of these countries,
the quality of housing is low, and the affordability of heating or cooling cost is high
despite the progress made in recent years through public investments in energy efficiency policies and measures and efforts to involve the stakeholders addressing the problem.
Implementing energy efficiency measures is more complicated in these countries than in Western Europe, particularly due to mass privatization of the housing sector combined with the deconstruction of the social safety net during the 1990s. Privately owned multi-family apartment blocks predominated and increased of energy costs became a burden to family budgets. In parallel, socialist era collective maintenance mechanisms were abandoned, whereby the decay of homeowners’ associations has not been adequately addressed.
Implementation of the ComAct project
The ComAct project is interested in solving problem of energy inefficient buildings in this region as the REELIH project does, however, its focus in more on overall issue of the energy poverty. To be piloted in Hungary, Bulgaria, Republic of North Macedonia, Lithuania and Ukraine, ComAct will provide a set of financial, technical and organizational instruments that can be replicated all over Europe to solve the “heat or eat” problem of low-income families and increase efficiency and multiple benefits coming from the renovation of multifamily buildings. The impact will already be visible in the three years timeframe of the project, with its aim to involve more than 3000 consumers and trigger almost 10 million euros of investments in sustainable energy. However, the biggest impact of ComAct lies in the lessons learned coming out of the pilots, to be replicated all over Europe.
Contribution delivered by ComAct will be key in providing EU countries a set of instruments to lift millions of its citizens out of energy poverty and to ensure that buildings provide a healthy and affordable living and working environment.
We are proud to say that the ComAct project originated from the working group of partner organizations that has been created under the REELIH project. Common interest in energy poverty in the CEE and CIS region of this group outgrew to the idea of making a case together and the willingness to contribute to the alleviation of energy poverty in a joint project. For more information about who stands behind this starting project, please, visit a brand new website of ComAct project.
Find more information about ComAct project here.
Read the full press release here.
