In this new study, we examine the challenges and opportunities for Bone Bolango District (Gorontalo Province, Indonesia) to achieve its sustainable development goals. Unlike most Districts being supported today in Indonesia to develop or implement their forest-friendly development strategies, Bone Bolango has high forest cover and does not have high rates of deforestation driven by a major export commodity. Thus, instead of focusing on current, acute threats to the District's forests, we imagined potential development pathways and assessed their potential impact. We identified key constraints to and the costs of more efficient, forest-friendly production of main commodities, including coffee, palm sugar, and corn. We estimated the economic value of diverse benefits of standing forests and compared these with the commodity production revenues. A key finding was that there are substantial economic and indirect values in the standing forest and some forest conversion does not appear to increase economic welfare. This points to a high potential for intervening to enhance forest values to favor forests.