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Policies, especially in the European Union, encourage government and privately funded programs to engage in "energy efficiency first" strategies. Those policies lead to the moderation of energy demand and are long-term solutions that not only protect households from price fluctuations and energy poverty, but also allow people to reduce their environmental footprint and save money in the long term. Energy poverty usually occurs when a household is unable to secure a level and quality of domestic energy services - space cooling and heating, cooking, appliances, information technology etc. - sufficient for its social and material needs. In the Global North, energy poverty is generally attributed to internal and external factors such as low incomes, energy-inefficient homes and high energy prices, while in the Global South, the infrastructural lack of access to more technologically advanced energy carriers is the main culprit. Energy poverty in developing countries is gaining interest thanks to the seventh Sustainable Development Goal: Affordable and clean energy. Still, so far, in the European Union and in the rest of the world, little has been done to sew together the two concepts and include the most vulnerable part of the population in an approach that reconciles environmental and climate risks with social issues. In practice, energy poverty and efficiency agendas are rarely coordinated. Energy efficiency and a better pooling of the resources (known also as "sufficiency") could lead to higher resiliency to the social and climate crisis. Keywords: energy poverty, energy efficiency, Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper scrutinizes existing policy efforts to address energy poverty at the governance scale of the European Union (EU) and its constituent Member States. Our main starting point is the recent expansion of energy poverty policies at the EU level, fuelled by the regulatory provisions of the Clean Energy for all Europeans Package, as well as the establishment of an EU Energy Poverty Observatory. Aided by a systematic and customized methodology, we survey the extensive scientific body of work that has recently been published on the topic, as well as the multiple strategies and measures to address energy poverty that have been formulated across the EU. This includes the principal mitigation approaches adopted by key European and national institutions. We develop a framework to judge the distributional and procedural justice provisions within the recently adopted National Energy and Climate Plans, as an indicator of the power, ability and resolve of relevant institutions to combat the causes and consequences of energy injustice. We also provide a research and policy agenda for future action, highlighting a series of scientific and decision-making challenges in the European and global context.