Nicaragua is the second-poorest economy in Latin America after Haiti, and has already lost much of its forest cover to agricultural development. About 21 percent of the country’s forests disappeared between 1990 and 2005. The silver lining is that the government now legally recognizes 49 percent of the remaining forests as community-owned forests, more than other Latin American countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and Bolivia. Community forests are important not only for preserving indigenous livelihoods, but for protecting biodiversity and curbing climate change. Recent research from WRI and the Rights and Resources Initiative found that legally recognized and protected community forests have lower rates of deforestation than forests where community rights are insecure. The world’s 513 million hectares of legally recognized community forest store 37 billion tonnes of carbon—29 times the annual carbon footprint of all passenger vehicles. But Nicaragua’s government was slow to protect communities’ rights to forests. Indeed, it was indigenous communities themselves who stepped up and conserved their forests in the face of government inaction.