Many governments are investigating tools to facilitate privatization and attract investment on real estate and commercial enterprises, to manage migration and rapid urbanization, to formalize informal development, to save energy, to manage natural disasters, to overcome economic crises, to redistribute wealth and reduce poverty and to speed up the procedures for development projects of national importance.

The presentation gives examples of the current pressing challenges some countries must face in order to achieve good governance; mainly challenges that refer to land reforms due to political, economic and climate changes. These land reforms affect people's properties and people's lives, thus they cannot be easily achieved without transparency, public awareness and acceptance, citizen involvement and, most importantly, without "reliable" spatial data. The existence of "reliable" data and SDIs is critical and urgent for any successful decision-making. However, the term "reliable" data very often is understood to be data of "high accuracy".

The creation of spatial data of high accuracy is expensive and time-consuming. In order to meet the current needs of society it is important to be pragmatic and flexible and to understand the accuracies and the usefulness of the various forms of spatial information. Data interoperability is also difficult to be achieved, even within each country, resulting in a waste of assets through redundant data collection.