The United Nations General Assembly has voted to move past the 16th-century Mercator projection, endorsing a new world map that shows continents at their true relative size. The resolution passed by 164 votes to 1 on September 4, with only the United States voting no and six countries abstaining.
The vote capped an African-led campaign, backed by the African Union and negotiated by Togo, against the flat map most of the world grew up with. The text, titled “Correct the map”, does not ban Mercator or impose a single replacement. It encourages governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection, drawn in 2018, and other equal-area maps whenever the relative size of countries matters. It also asks teachers to explain that every flat map of a round planet involves trade-offs.
The problem with Mercator is area, not direction. Gerardus Mercator designed his 1569 projection so sailors could plot straight courses with a compass, and the price was scale: land stretches the farther it sits from the equator. On a typical classroom map, Greenland looks roughly as big as Africa. Africa is about 14 times larger. Northern Europe and North America get the same inflation, while Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Oceania appear shrunken. The resolution calls the result a “symbolic minimization” of Africa.
The debate in New York was not purely cartographic. The US representative said the initiative “mocks the work and purpose of this institution” and dismissed it as part of a “radical ideological project”, singling out the resolution’s language about reparations and “cognitive justice”. Ukraine abstained because some Equal Earth maps show Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory in a way it called unacceptable. Ireland, speaking for the EU, stressed that the text covers education only and says nothing about sovereignty or borders.
France went the other way. Hours before the vote, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that Paris plans to drop Mercator for its official world maps, a change that will make France itself look smaller. “Changing maps obviously doesn’t change the world,” he said, “but correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth.”
Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, put the case more plainly. “A fair map does not change the geography of the world, it changes how we see the world,” he said before the vote.
The resolution is nonbinding, and no classroom has to repaint a wall by Monday. But 164 countries just put it on record that the map on the wall shapes how people picture the planet, and that the version most of them grew up with was drawn for sailors in 1569.
Sources:
UN News: UN tells the world: Stop making Africa look small
UN Meetings Coverage: General Assembly Adopts Text to ‘Correct the Map’
Draft resolution A/80/L.104 (UN Digital Library)
Diplo: UN adopts resolution to use an Equal Earth projection
Featured image: “Equal Earth projection SW” by Strebe, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
