New elm hopes

those of Brazil and Congo, and their biological diversity is unique. But logging is putting the forest ecosystems under unprecedented pressure — between 1990 and 2005, Indonesia lost 28 million hectares of forest, most of it virgin forest. The government has banned the export of unprocessed logs from the country but timber is regularly smuggled out via Malaysia and Singapore for processing in other neighbouring countries, from where it is exported across the world. Much of the illegally traded timber is known to end up in the US and EU. In October last year, the forestry ministry introduced a policy which requires companies to have the timber stocks audited to ensure that it originated in sustainably managed forests, in a further attempt to halt illegal logging. However, corruption is widespread and reduces the effectiveness of any legislation or enforcement attempts. Indonesia is one of three Asian countries to have requested assistance from the UN to combat deforestation. The Norwegian government has provided $35 million for the first phase of the programme, aimed at encouraging tropical countries to reduce forest destruction through establishing systems for monitoring, assessment, reporting and verification of forests and carbon stocks, and for capacity building. But progress has been slow. Although the US's new law, making it an offence to import any wood products made of illegal timber, has been welcomed, enforcement is still a major issue. And there is also a cost. At the moment consumers in western countries pay on average an extra 10 per cent for certified wood products. The current audit-paper based approach is very time consuming and costly, says Hill. This is partly why only just over seven per cent of the world's forests are certified and only 1.2 per cent in Asia, according to the UK's Timber Trade Federation. " People say they are happy to pay that extra 10 per cent, but when they walk into a store, they often leave with uncertified cheaper products, " says Hill. He hopes a new DNA checking system might help. " Our aim is to make the tracking process more robust and to make it very inexpensive, " he says. Britain's population of elm trees, one of the most desirable sources of hardwood timber, has been decimated, not by logging but by disease. The beetles carrying the lethal fungus of Dutch elm disease have almost wiped out the species from the UK. But …