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European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency
News article15 March 2021

ComAct is set to renovate multi-family apartment buildings and fight energy poverty

ComAct logo

ComAct ( Community Tailored Actions for Energy Poverty Mitigation)  seeks to unlock high impact / high-cost energy efficiency improvements in multi-family apartment buildings in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) regions. 

In the coming three years, the project funded by Horizon 2020 Energy Efficiency intends to demonstrate that it is possible to make energy efficient renovations affordable and manageable for energy-poor communities by operating in three dimensions: 

  • Empowering and activating the communities of homeowners’ associations, 
  • Developing and adapting financial tools that provide financing for low-income families
  • Optimising technical solutions that provide most favourable cost-benefit ratio for the energy efficient improvements in multi-family apartment buildings. 

The ComAct approach will be tested in five pilot countries (Hungary, Bulgaria, Republic of North Macedonia, Lithuania and Ukraine), representing the different sub-regions of the CEE and CIS territory. The impact will already be visible in the timeframe of the project, as it aims to involve more than 3,000 citizens 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. In the context of the Renovation Wave efforts, ComAct has the potential to provide EU policy makers a set of instruments to lift citizens out of energy poverty and ensure that buildings provide a healthy and affordable living and working environment. 
Energy poverty represents a problem all over Europe, and is particularly acute in the CEE and CIS regions, where energy costs are high and the housing stock is dominated by privately-owned inefficient multi-family apartment blocks with insufficient maintenance. In this context, undertaking renovation works requires coordinated action among apartment owners with limited investment capacity. Therefore, there is a need to develop a new approach to make interventions affordable, substantially reduce energy costs and lift people out of energy poverty.


The project is coordinated by Habitat for Humanity International (Slovakia) and the Consortium includes BPIE –Buildings Performance Institute Europe (Belgium), IWO –Housing Initiative for Eastern Europe(Germany), LVOA-ALCO –Alliance of Lithuanian Consumer Organisations (Lithuania), , MRI –Metropolitan Research Institute (Hungary), Odessa Housing Union Association(Ukraine), ENOVA(Bosnia and Herzegovina), EnEffect (Bulgaria) and Habitat for Humanity Macedonia (Republic of North Macedonia).

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Publication date
15 March 2021