UN to vote on replacing Mercator map with accurate Equal Earth projection

On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly will vote on whether to formally retire one of the world's most enduring maps. The resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by all 54 other African Union member states, asks the global community to phase out the Mercator projection—the map that has hung in classrooms, guided navigation systems, and shaped how billions of people visualize the planet for nearly five centuries.

The Mercator projection was designed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to solve a practical problem: how to represent a spherical Earth on a flat surface in a way that preserved navigational accuracy for sailors. It worked brilliantly for that purpose. But the mathematical distortion required to flatten the globe created a persistent visual lie. Regions near the equator shrank. High-latitude areas swelled. Africa, which is 14 times larger than Greenland, appears on the Mercator map as roughly the same size as the Danish territory. The United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico, and much of Europe could fit inside Africa's actual borders with room remaining, yet the map renders the continent as a modest landmass.

Robert Dussey, Togo's foreign affairs minister, framed the push as a matter of scientific accuracy rather than politics. "There is scientific proof so we all have to accept the reality," he said. The African Union endorsed the #CorrectTheMap campaign in August 2025 and asked Togo to drive its adoption at the UN. The campaign, which has gathered more than 11,000 signatures on Change.org, proposes replacing Mercator with the Equal Earth projection, a more accurate design developed by an international team of cartographers in 2018.

But the argument runs deeper than cartography. Historians and geographers have long noted that the Mercator projection is rooted in Western stereotypes, and activists have begun using the term "cartographic colonialism" to describe how the map has subtly reshaped global power dynamics. By visually minimizing the Global South while inflating Northern Hemisphere nations, critics argue, the projection has reinforced systemic biases in international trade, development priorities, and educational frameworks for centuries. JJ Enoch, a senior associate at JS Held, a geopolitical risk advisory firm based in London, connected the map campaign to African nations' broader push for "greater influence in global institutions and greater control over how the continent is represented." An equal-area map, he suggested, would offer "a more accurate basis for education and public understanding, while signalling that Africa's demographic, economic and geopolitical importance should no longer be viewed through inherited and distorted conventions."

The most prominent historical challenge to Mercator came from Arno Peters, a German historian who launched an alternative map based on the Gall-Peters projection in 1973. That effort gained traction in some circles but never displaced Mercator as the global standard. This time, African nations have the institutional machinery of the UN behind them. Though UN resolutions are non-binding, passage could trigger real-world change. If the vote succeeds, classroom curricula could shift, and technology platforms—Google Maps, educational software, navigation systems—might begin displaying the Equal Earth projection as the default.

Togo's government is already planning implementation. Dussey said the country will host an event in Lomé, the capital, during the first quarter of next year with UNESCO, the African Union, and tech companies like Google Maps to coordinate the rollout. The precedent is encouraging. In March, Ghana sponsored a UN resolution describing the slave trade as the "gravest crime against humanity," which passed with 123 votes in favor, three against, and 52 abstentions. That success has given map advocates reason to believe Friday's vote could go their way. Dussey's closing statement carried both urgency and defiance: "To those who say why now, I say, why not? When we look at the world map, it is time for us to change the narrative. It's time for us in Africa to take responsibility to change what we can change ourselves."