More than £20m extra has been earmarked by Dundee City Council to help build a green recovery from the pandemic.
The council’s £386m capital plan for the next five years contains an additional £22m of projects which focus on energy, mobility, waste and resilience.
John Alexander convener of Dundee City Council’s policy and resources committee said: “The pandemic has presented countless challenges but of them all, re-building the economy and the growth of our city has to be done with sustainability at its heart.
“To do that we need to continue to ramp up the significant investment we have already made in the built environment that will address the issues raised by the on-going climate emergency.
“The city has come together in the past few years to make serious commitments with the energy centre at the Regional Performance Centre for Sport and the Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc.
“The money identified in the latest version of the five-year capital plan agreed by the policy and resources on Monday will continue to drive that progress forward.
“We have spent nearly £60 million over the last three years to tackle climate change and with these additional projects, it will bring the total in the plan up to almost £115m by 2026.”
Among the items identified in the plan are £9m for the Broughty Ferry to Monifieth active travel corridor, £6m for sustainability and low carbon projects, £3m for housing energy saving measures and projects including sustainable transport and infrastructure and fleet electric vehicles.
The additional expenditure in the plan reinforces a city-wide commitment made last year by the Dundee Partnership to establish a Dundee Climate Leadership Group which will bolster local efforts to tackle climate change and help achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for the city in the next 25 years.
Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc Ltd. (MSIP)
Creating a new future for people, place and planet MSIP is an ambitious joint venture between Dundee City Council, Michelin, and Scottish Enterprise, created to drive growth and diversity in the Scottish economy while addressing the global climate emergency.
Dundee City Council
Dundee draws skilled workers from a 60-minute catchment population of 640,000 and has a local population of over 140,000. The availability of a large pool of highly skilled labour is a key feature in the Dundee economy. Flexibility in the labour force is currently more prevalent in Dundee than in Scotland as a whole. All forms of labour market flexibility - part-time, temporary employment, self-employment and shift work - are widely operational within the city. Labour force stability in the city is excellent, enabling companies to plan with confidence. Labour turnover levels are less than 5% and absenteeism averages 2%.
