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Li Ka-shing companies in deal to store 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in Australia

The agricultural property in Australia is three times the size of Hong Kong

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Li Ka-shing, left, with son Victor Li Tzar-kuoi. Photo: Dickson Lee
Companies under the umbrella of billionaire Li Ka-shing agreed to acquire land-use rights for agricultural property in Australia that is three times the size of Hong Kong with a plan to store a million tonnes of carbon dioxide to offset their footprint.
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CK Asset Holdings and CK Hutchison Holdings are jointly entering the regenerative agriculture sector via CK Life Sciences, the companies said Wednesday. CK Life Sciences is part of CK Hutchison.

“As one of the initial players in this new industry, [the group acquired] pastoral leases and rights [to] over 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, around 3.5 times the size of the total land area of Hong Kong, designated for carbon sequestration in Australia,” said Kam Hing Lam, deputy managing director of CK Asset and CK Hutchison and president of CK Life Sciences.

Regenerative agriculture, according to organic farming researcher the Rodale Institute, is “a holistic approach to farming that encourages continuous innovation and improvement of environmental, social, and economic measures.” One of its areas of interest is biosequestration, which takes produced carbon and stores it in a pool, which helps to limit climate change. This carbon sequestration is the focus of the CK group’s Australia regenerative agriculture project.

“We hope that through these regenerative agriculture schemes, we will make our contributions towards carbon reduction,” Kam said. In the future, more regenerative agriculture projects will be pursued, he added.

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Australia offers high-quality sequestration projects, operates an established regulatory system and has a growing market for carbon credits, the group said in a statement.

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