UN Votes for World Map That Shows Africa’s True Size
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly backed a resolution encouraging countries to move away from the centuries-old Mercator projection and use maps that more accurately represent the actual size of the world’s continents. The resolution was approved on September 4 with 164 countries voting in favour, the United States voting against, and six countries abstaining.
The initiative was led by Togo and supported by the African Union. Its main target is the widespread use of the Mercator projection, which significantly enlarges areas closer to the North and South Poles while making equatorial regions such as Africa appear disproportionately smaller.
The resolution promotes the Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018, as an alternative. Unlike Mercator, Equal Earth is designed to preserve the relative areas of continents, giving viewers a much more accurate impression of their actual size.
The difference is particularly striking for Africa. The continent covers roughly 30.3 million square kilometres, making it about 14 times larger than Greenland. Yet on a conventional Mercator world map, Greenland can appear roughly comparable in size to Africa.
The issue is not limited to Africa. The Mercator projection also makes South America, South Asia and Oceania appear smaller relative to Europe and North America than their actual land areas. The Equal Earth projection seeks to correct this imbalance while accepting that every flat map of a spherical Earth involves some form of distortion.
African governments and campaigners have argued that the problem is more than a technical cartographic issue. They say maps influence how people understand geography, power and the relative importance of different parts of the world, particularly when the same representation is repeatedly used in schools, textbooks and digital platforms.
The United States was the only country to oppose the resolution. Washington characterized the initiative as an ideological project and argued that it distracted from more important international challenges. Six countries — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — abstained.
Importantly, the UN vote does not legally ban the Mercator projection. The resolution encourages governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to consider Equal Earth and other equal-area projections when accurate comparisons of land size are important. Mercator remains particularly useful for certain navigation applications.
The vote therefore represents less a sudden replacement of every world map and more a major symbolic and educational shift in how the world is represented. Supporters hope it will eventually lead to wider adoption of more geographically accurate maps in classrooms, media, government and digital mapping services.
