UN votes to replace Mercator map with equal-area projection reflecting Africa's true size

On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted to retire a map that has hung in classrooms, offices, and government buildings for nearly five centuries. The resolution passed 164 to 1, with six nations abstaining. Only the United States cast a vote against it.

The map in question is the Mercator projection, drawn in 1569 by a Flemish cartographer named Gerardus Mercator to help European sailors navigate the world's oceans. It has become the default image of Earth—the one most people picture when they think of continents and countries. But it carries a profound distortion: it renders Africa roughly the same size as Greenland on paper, even though Africa is actually fourteen times larger. The same mathematical compromise that made the Mercator useful for navigation—a technique that preserves angles and compass directions—systematically shrinks landmasses near the equator and inflates those near the poles.

Togo sponsored the resolution, working alongside the African Union's fifty-four member states, which had formally adopted an alternative in February. That alternative is called the Equal Earth projection, developed by a team of cartographers in 2018. It sacrifices some navigational precision in exchange for something the Mercator never offered: an honest accounting of how much space each continent actually occupies. The campaign behind the push, branded #CorrectTheMap, made the math plain: you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico, and much of Europe inside Africa's borders and still have room left over.

Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey framed the vote as a question of truth-telling. "A fair world begins with a fair map," he told Reuters. In a UN briefing, he went further: "A map is never neutral. It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood." France's Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot echoed the sentiment, announcing that his ministry would stop using the Mercator map. "Changing the map obviously doesn't change the world," Barrot said. "But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth."

The United States objected sharply. Yaryna Ferencevych, the US representative at the UN, called the resolution a mockery of the General Assembly's purpose. She argued that the body should focus on genuine problems—international peace, prosperity, economic relations—rather than debating cartographic choices from the sixteenth century and what she characterized as efforts to promote "cognitive justice" and reparations. The US had taken a similar stance in March when the General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade "the gravest crime against humanity."

But for the groups and voices pushing for change, the map's distortion was never merely technical. Lerato Mogoatlhe, representing Africa No Filter, one of the organizations behind the campaign, told the BBC that misrepresenting Africa on world maps was fundamentally a narrative problem. It was part of stopping what she called "the world's longest misinformation and disinformation" about the continent. Kioko Muendo, a Kenyan geographer, put it in economic terms: the Mercator projection has implicitly downplayed Africa's vast resources, its population, and its investment potential. "Maps are more than just guides for travellers," he said. "They shape how regions are perceived politically and economically."

The resolution is non-binding, which means no nation is legally required to adopt the Equal Earth projection. But the vote signals something real: a shift in how major institutions may choose to represent the world. The map you see in a classroom, a government office, or a news broadcast shapes what people believe about the world's geography—and about which places matter. For nearly five hundred years, one particular choice about how to flatten a sphere has gone largely unquestioned. On Friday, that began to change.