Requirements for Reporting on Energy Access and Energy Poverty Pillar in the MyCovenant Platform for the CoM Signatories in EaP Region

Dear signatories of the Covenant of Mayors in the Eastern Partnership region!

Please be advised of the below requirements for the reporting on Energy Access and Energy Poverty pillar that are aimed to ensure compliance of the reporting with the requirements of the Common Reporting Framework (CRF).

CRF is a standardized set of reporting requirements, launched in 2018, designed to streamline city climate action planning, monitoring, and reporting. It harmonizes reporting across regions, covering GHG emissions, climate risks, and energy access.

Requirements

After January 2025, the general requirement is that all signatories submitting a report (either a SECAP or a monitoring report for an approved SECAP) must report on the energy poverty (EP) pillar.

Accordingly, within a certain timeframe, all CoM East signatories must incorporate an EP component into their action plans alongside mitigation and adaptation measures.

New signatories who have committed to addressing EP in their adhesion forms will fulfil this commitment by integrating the pillar directly into their SECAPs and subsequent monitoring reports.

Signatories who joined the Covenant a long time ago and who did not take a commitment to addressing EP in their adhesion forms and submitted/accepted SECAPs must gradually integrate this pillar through the monitoring report templates in My Covenant.

Below is a more detailed description of the above.

Signatories that joined the Covenant after 2022 and who signed the Adhesion Form with a commitment to tackle EP:

• This group of signatories must submit a SECAP document and online template that includes an EP component.
• While submitting action plans via the MyCovenant platform, signatories have to: define an energy poverty goal, including a base year and target year, report on energy access inventory by selecting a unit and setting a value for the indicator “Percentage of households or population within the city boundary that face energy poverty” of “Affordability” attribute, which is mandatory for our region. This indicator will be highlighted in green (as a mandatory field). In case data on the mandatory indicator is not available, signatories may choose another indicator within the same attribute, marking the mandatory fields as N/A.
• In the same way, information on energy access and energy poverty actions shall be reflected in a corresponding table of MY ACTIONS section.
• The same procedure applies to Monitoring Reports, where actions on tackling EP shall be reported.

All other signatories that signed Adhesion Forms without a reference to tackling energy poverty:

• If, for any reason, signatories of this group have not yet submitted their SECAPs, then their action plans shall reflect an EP component both in hard copy and in the online submission, as described above. The same applies to monitoring reports.
• If signatories have already submitted SECAPs where EP pillar was not reflected, then this pillar shall be reflected in the monitoring reports template of MyCovenant. To do this, when filling out the online template of monitoring report, a signatory must also fill in the relevant mandatory fields related to “Energy Access” in MYSTRATEGY, MY INVENTORIES and “Energy access and energy poverty actions” in MY ACTIONS (as described previously).

Regarding the latter point, the following important clarification is necessary. Since signatories whose action plans had not included a reference to EP likely did not implement any energy poverty tackling measures, they will not be able to provide monitoring reports on this component (tackling actions were not planned, hence, no actions implemented and no results can be monitored and reported).

Therefore, the Joint Research Center considers that by reflecting information on EP and by listing EP tackling actions in the monitoring report, signatories do not report on implementation, but rather integrate EP pillar into their SECAPs. In other words, information on mitigation and adaptation will be considered as a monitoring report of implementation of mitigation and adaptation actions, while information on tackling EP will be considered as baseline information on EP and proposed (not yet implemented) actions.

This is an easy way to integrate EP pillar into the online platform without revision / re-approval / re-submission of SECAP.

However, it is expected that municipalities will complement the SECAP with the analysis of the EP Pillar.