All over the world environmental and agricultural researchers, policy-makers and decision-makers need baseline information on natural resources. There is strong and increasing pressure on the natural resources of earth. Nowadays, many tools are available to make up-to-date information easily accessible for informed decision-making. One of these is a geo-referenced natural resources information system using an internationally standardised format, called SOTER, the World Soils and Terrain Digital Database. It has many strengths, one of which is the capability of transforming soil and terrain data from individual countries, collected and stored at different scales and in different formats, into a world-wide system. It is for just this purpose that the Agro-Ecological Zoning Programme of the Namibian Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rural Development compiled national-level data into the 1:1 million scale NAMSOTER, the Namibian version of SOTER. This will form part of the 'WORLD-SOTER' to be compiled by FAO.