England plans to map the entire country in 3D using planes equipped with lasers

"Within the next three years, England will use light detection and ranging (LIDAR) to survey the entirety of the country at one-meter resolution. LIDAR imaging has been an ongoing process for nearly 20 years in an effort to reduce flood risk. At present, about 75 percent of the country has been mapped, but the coverage is sparse in unpopulated areas and national parks.

All the data will also be available free to the public, as is the case with the current LIDAR data. In the past two years, users made more than a half-million LIDAR downloads from the Survey Open Data site...."