A Territorial Adaptive Composite Index for Urban Energy Poverty: Local Vulnerability Drivers

Energy poverty is increasingly recognised as a multidimensional chal- lenge affecting urban resilience, public health and social equity across European cities. Despite the availability of consolidated national indicators, existing mon- itoring frameworks often lack the spatial resolution required to support local decision-making and place-based policy design. This paper proposes an aggre- gated and territorially sensitive urban energy poverty index that integrates six ana- lytical drivers socio-economic, building-related, energy, climatic, urbanistic and institutional within a flexible composite indicator structure. The methodological contribution lies in the integration of high-resolution local data with official Euro- pean indicators and in the adoption of an entropy-based weighting system, which derives data-driven weights from the variability of indicators across neighbour- hoods. The methodology is applied to the Mediterranean city of Catania (Italy), revealing pronounced intra-urban disparities in energy vulnerability, with com- posite index values ranging from 0,04 in affluent central areas to 0,74 in periph- eral public housing districts. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach captures spatial patterns and dominant drivers of energy poverty that remain invis- ible in aggregated statistics, providing a robust analytical basis for targeted urban energy and social policies