UN adopts Equal Earth map projection to more accurately represent African continent

On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted to replace one of the world's most enduring cartographic tools with a new map designed to show continents as they actually are. The Equal Earth projection, adopted by 164 countries with the United States voting against it and six nations abstaining, corrects a distortion that has persisted for nearly five centuries—one baked into classrooms, atlases, and the visual imagination of billions of people.

The Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for maritime navigation, was never meant to be a true representation of the world's landmasses. It prioritized accurate angles and shapes for seafaring purposes, but in doing so, it warped scale in ways that have shaped how people understand geography ever since. Europe and North America balloon across the map, appearing vastly larger than they actually are. Africa and South America shrink. Greenland, a Danish territory of roughly 56,000 square miles, looks nearly as large as the entire African continent, which spans 11.7 million square miles. This wasn't accidental—it was the mathematical cost of flattening a sphere onto paper.

The Equal Earth projection, developed by a group of cartographers in 2018, takes a different approach. It preserves the relative surface areas of continents while maintaining their shapes as closely as possible to how they appear on a globe. Africa becomes visibly larger. Latin America, South Asia, and Oceania all gain their proper proportions. Bojan Savric, one of the cartographers behind the projection, explained the principle simply: the map shows the world as it actually is, not as centuries of navigation charts have trained us to see it.

Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey, who sponsored the resolution, framed the vote as a matter of truth and perception. Maps are never neutral, he argued. They guide education, shape imagination, and influence how societies understand their place in the world. When a map presents a distorted image, that distortion gets passed down through generations, becoming invisible—just the way things are. The resolution urged all UN member states to adopt Equal Earth in place of Mercator.

The United States, however, saw the vote differently. US representative Yaryna Ferencevych called the resolution a symptom of institutional dysfunction, saying the UN should focus on genuine crises rather than debating cartographic history. She characterized the debate as a distraction, one that conflated map projections with broader questions about reparations and what some call cognitive justice—the idea that how the world is represented to us shapes power and understanding in ways that matter.

France took the opposite view. As co-sponsor of the resolution, the French government announced Friday that it would abandon Mercator entirely. Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot noted that in the traditional projection, the United States, Russia, and China loom disproportionately large while Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia shrink. "Changing maps obviously doesn't change the world," he said. "But correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth." The move also signals France's broader effort to strengthen ties with African nations, particularly former colonies where relationships have been strained.

The vote itself was decisive—164 countries in favor, one against, six abstaining. It represents a rare moment of consensus at the General Assembly, one that cuts across regions and economic interests. What happens next remains to be seen. Adoption by the UN does not automatically mean governments, schools, or publishers will switch. The Mercator projection has five centuries of institutional weight behind it. But the vote marks an official acknowledgment that how we see the world matters, and that seeing it more accurately is worth doing.