By a vote of 164 to 1, the United Nations General Assembly on Friday backed a resolution promoting the Equal Earth map projection, capping a years-long campaign by African nations to retire the visual distortions embedded in the 16th-century Mercator projection.
The measure, titled “Correct the Map,” was sponsored by Togo on behalf of the African Union and co-sponsored by the Bahamas, France, and others. Six countries—Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine—abstained while the United States cast the lone dissenting vote.
The resolution aims to address what campaigners call a colonial-era injustice that has visually shrunk Africa for 450 years, shaping perceptions of the continent across media, education, and policy.
The culprit is the Mercator projection, devised by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 primarily as a navigational aid for European sailors, a tool that distorts relative landmass sizes by inflating regions nearer the poles.
The most cited illustration of the problem: Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa on a Mercator map, despite Africa being about 14 times larger.
Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, framed the vote as a matter of collective psychology as much as geography, arguing maps shape imagination and perception across generations and are never neutral instruments.
Notably, the measure stops short of a ban. It does not prohibit the Mercator projection or mandate a replacement; instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organizations, and technology companies to adopt the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps when relative size is the relevant consideration, while teaching the inherent limitations of any flat map of a curved planet.
Togo’s foreign ministry stressed the resolution “in no way challenges the use of the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains fully suited.”
Speaking for the bloc, Ireland emphasized that the resolution concerned only the relative size of landmasses and had no bearing on sovereignty, territorial status, or internationally recognized borders, while some delegations warned that endorsing the projection without safeguards could open a “Pandora’s box” around disputed territories.
France moved fastest to act on the vote. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced in a Sorbonne speech that his ministry would abandon the Mercator projection in favor of maps tailored to specific uses and more faithful to actual surface areas, in line with cartographers’ recommendations.
Writing on X after the vote, Barrot said changing the map obviously doesn’t change the world, but correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth. The gesture lands amid a broader French push to repair relations with former African colonies, several of which have grown openly hostile to Paris’s continued influence in recent years.
The U.S. delegation was unambiguous in its opposition. American representatives dismissed the initiative as part of a “radical ideological project,” arguing the General Assembly was squandering its credibility on cartographic symbolism invoking 16th-century map projections and debates over reparations and “cognitive justice” rather than what Washington considers the world body’s genuine problems.
The dispute ultimately traces back to an unavoidable mathematical problem: no flat map can perfectly represent a sphere. Every projection involves a trade-off, since the curved surface of the Earth cannot be transferred without distortion onto a rectangle; different projections preserve different properties, whether direction, shape, distance, or area. Mercator prioritized angles and shapes, useful for plotting a compass course at sea, at the cost of accurate scale.
The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny, and Tom Patterson as an alternative inspired by the Robinson projection, instead preserves the true relative size of landmasses while attempting to keep their shapes recognizable, a trade-off critics of Mercator argue is long overdue given how thoroughly the older map shaped global self-perception.
Whether classrooms, atlases, and tech platforms actually make the switch remains to be seen; the resolution, after all, is a recommendation, not a mandate. But symbolically, Friday’s vote marks the first time the world’s largest multilateral body has formally endorsed retiring a 450-year-old convention in favor of geographic accuracy.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The UN’s adoption of the Equal Earth projection isn’t a ban on Mercator maps; it’s a non-binding nudge toward geographic accuracy.
For 450 years, the world’s dominant map made Africa look smaller than it is (14 times smaller than Greenland, despite them appearing similar in size), and this vote backed by 164 nations against only the US, signals a broader push to correct how maps have shaped global perceptions of power and scale, even as the US calls it a symbolic distraction from “real” issues.
