In the last two decades Vietnam has made a remarkable achievement in reducing poverty in both urban and rural areas. Over the same period, it has made strides in the direction of slowing deforestation and restoring forest cover, and protecting biodiversity. In this brief paper we contribute a perspective on how to balance plans for a further decline of remaining poverty with concurrent improvement in forest conservation and management.Our contribution focuses on a description of the strong patterns of association between the location of poor people (and relatedly, other types of poverty measures) and the location of remaining natural forests in Vietnam. The paper focuses on measurement and analysis of these patterns at the commune level using geographic datasources for both poverty and forest. We give a graphical overviewof the relationships between the two, but are well aware that thepolicy implications of these patterns of association require further elaboration than this paper can provide. We hope that - in particular - policy makers and planners inVietnam responsible for poverty alleviation and natural resource management will find our paper interesting and useful.