Energy poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon that affects many Europeans. Alleviating energy poverty is high in the EU, national, and local policy agendas. Despite the attention the phenomenon has been gaining from a policy perspective, especially after the current energy crisis, there are still some gaps due to the complexity of the issue and its vastly different manifestations across Europe. This manuscript presents the policy implications stemming from the implementation of the POWEPROOR approach in alleviating energy poverty in eight European countries, as co-created with relevant stakeholders in each country. The knowledge gained from empowering energy-poor citizens by promoting behavioural changes and small-scale energy efficiency interventions, as well as by encouraging the uptake of renewable energy sources in the form of collective energy initiatives while leveraging innovative financing schemes, resulted in policy recommendations for national and sub-national governments and lessons for civil society and the private sector.

The accelerated penetration of distributed renewable energy sources in energy communities has shifted the operational bottleneck from generationto coordinated demand-side management. This paper presents FLEXCOMM, a web platform supporting self-consumption optimization in energy communities through two complementary services. Its public, community-level service aggregates community demand and PV park production into 24-hour measured and forecast curves, computes self-consumption indicators, and translates surplus windows into natural-language load-shifting suggestions. Its authenticated, member-level service delivers comfort-aware HVAC scheduling that operates identically under cooling- and heating-dominated conditions, coupling unsupervised HVAC disaggregation of the aggregated smart-meter signal with regime-aware indoor temperature and humidity forecasting and a mixed-integer linear programming scheduler with a machine-learning-based comfort-repair loop under thermal-comfort constraints. Both services share a containerized FastAPI/React architecture with role-based access; each layer is independently deployable, connects to existing metering, sensing, and weather infrastructure through documented REST APIs, and serves forecasting models as pluggable components, so new communities can be onboarded without modifying the codebase. FLEXCOMM operates in production for the Chalki energy community (Greece), with the member-level service replicated for the BCS Energia energy community (Hungary), demonstrating community-wide and household-level self-consumption analytics from a single, non-intrusive platform without appliance-level sub-metering.

The accelerated penetration of distributed renewable energy sources in energy communities has shifted the operational bottleneck from generationto coordinated demand-side management. This paper presents FLEXCOMM, a web platform supporting self-consumption optimization in energy communities through two complementary services. Its public, community-level service aggregates community demand and PV park production into 24-hour measured and forecast curves, computes self-consumption indicators, and translates surplus windows into natural-language load-shifting suggestions. Its authenticated, member-level service delivers comfort-aware HVAC scheduling that operates identically under cooling- and heating-dominated conditions, coupling unsupervised HVAC disaggregation of the aggregated smart-meter signal with regime-aware indoor temperature and humidity forecasting and a mixed-integer linear programming scheduler with a machine-learning-based comfort-repair loop under thermal-comfort constraints. Both services share a containerized FastAPI/React architecture with role-based access; each layer is independently deployable, connects to existing metering, sensing, and weather infrastructure through documented REST APIs, and serves forecasting models as pluggable components, so new communities can be onboarded without modifying the codebase. FLEXCOMM operates in production for the Chalki energy community (Greece), with the member-level service replicated for the BCS Energia energy community (Hungary), demonstrating community-wide and household-level self-consumption analytics from a single, non-intrusive platform without appliance-level sub-metering.

This paper presents the ENPOWER Flexibility Marketplace Toolkit, an open-source platform for peer-to-peer trading of energy flexibility within energy communities. Using energy consumption and production time-series data, participants can publish flexibility needs, submit offers, and verify delivery against measured baselines. Transactions are settled automatically through blockchain smart contracts with collateral enforcement, while an Energy Data Space backbone governs data exchange, ensuring sovereignty and policy-controlled sharing. Non-fungible tokens provide immutable, auditable certificates of each fulfilled flexibility commitment. The toolkit covers the complete trading lifecycle from market creation and participant onboarding through offer matching, delivery verification, and financial settlement.

Climate change is having profound impacts on human and natural systems. In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the need to address Loss and Damage (L&D) associated with the adverse effects of climate change, particularly in developing countries that are more vulnerable to its impacts. There is a range of studies, examining the concepts, resilience, adaptation and policy options for dealing with climate change losses and damages. This article discusses the actions, research and finance needs in Loss & Damage as well as the approaches to it on some topics such as adaptation, stakeholder engagement, governance and risk transfer.