The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging the global adoption of map projections that accurately reflect the true scale of the world’s continents. Spearheaded by Togo and backed by all 54 African Union member states, the #CorrectTheMap initiative aims to shift reliance away from the traditional 16th-century Mercator projection in favor of equal-area maps, such as the 2018 Equal Earth design. The resolution passed 164-1 on Friday, with six nations abstaining and the United States casting the sole dissenting vote.
While the Mercator projection was originally engineered in 1569 by cartographer Gerardus Mercator for maritime navigation, its mathematical method for flattening a spherical globe onto a rectangle severely distorts landmass sizes as they move further from the equator.
The Cartographic Shift
- Correcting Scale: The Mercator map heavily inflates northern nations while visually shrinking equatorial regions. Most notably, it often depicts Greenland and Africa as roughly equal in size, despite the African continent being 14 times larger.
- Equal Earth Adoption: The UN-endorsed Equal Earth projection preserves accurate relative surface areas without aggressively distorting regional shapes. Under this standard, Africa, Latin America, and South Asia gain significant visual prominence, while North America, Europe, and Russia are scaled down to accurate proportions.
- New Institutional Standards: Though non-binding, the resolution strongly encourages governments, educational systems, and tech companies to replace the Mercator map with equal-area projections in classrooms and digital platforms where relative scale matters.
Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey argued that maps actively shape education and collective geopolitical perceptions, framing the shift as a necessary step for the Global South to reclaim accurate representation on the world stage. France, a co-sponsor of the resolution, publicly supported the move, announcing it would abandon the Mercator projection in official uses to correct the long-standing visual imbalance.
The United States sharply criticized the initiative. U.S. representative Yaryna Ferencevych argued that the United Nations should be addressing critical global crises rather than debating 16th-century cartography, calling the resolution a distraction that harms the institution’s credibility. Despite Washington’s opposition, the successful vote marks a major diplomatic victory for the African Union, setting a new potential baseline for how digital platforms and textbooks will map the planet.
