- Being on the Positive List certifies that your product or practice is not common practice and that emissions avoided or sequestered via them have been declared "Additional" by the Minister.
- Being on the Positive list means your product or practice can be used as part of a 'methodology' for a offsets project under the Carbon Farming Initiative. (The Government recently announced grants to help innovators write up their brilliant products and practices into methodologies (or "meths"), with the help of scientists and other experts.
- You could earn royalties every time your innovation is used, if you have genuine intellectual property in your "meth".
The other barrier to listing is "common practice" - ie. if the activity is already widely adopted. It is assumed that once between 10% and 30% of landholders in a location or industry or "environment" have taken up the practice - in order to earn offsets - the balance will adopt it without the incentive of the offsets and therefore the emissions avoided or sequestered resulting would have happened anyway and are therefore not additional. An activity can be uncommon for all sorts of reasons: it is unusual in certain regions; it is unusual on the scale proposed; it is unusual at a particular time; it is a genuine variant of an activity. "The activity must be carefully defined to allow for an accurate assessment of whether or not it is not already common," says the Guidelines. This means you should be very specific defining your activity. It is recommended that you identify a relevant comparison group of non-users to "capture the circumstances in which the activity is uncommon".
The Government will be surveying farmers every couple of years to get a picture of penetration of activities. This is important to understand: your activity can be delisted as soon as it looks like being a success. But the benefits of being on the Positive List outweigh the difficulties.
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