The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday to abandon the Mercator projection as its standard world map in favour of one that shows Africa at its true relative size, in a resolution that passed 164 votes to one.

The “Correct the Map” resolution was carried with six abstentions. The United States was the only member state to vote against it. France and the United Kingdom were among those in favour.

What changes

The resolution backs the Equal Earth projection, an equal-area map introduced by a team of cartographers in 2018, as a replacement for the Mercator projection in general-purpose use. The African Union’s 54 member states adopted Equal Earth in February, saying it “more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa”.

The vote is not legally binding, and its effect depends on whether schools, publishers, newsrooms and digital platforms follow the UN’s lead. Al Jazeera reported that the resolution leaves the Mercator projection’s use in maritime and aerial navigation untouched, “for which it remains fully suited”.

The argument

The Mercator projection was designed in 1569 by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to help European navigators plot courses across the oceans. Because a sphere cannot be rendered on a flat sheet without distortion, his method preserves direction at the cost of area: land near the poles is inflated, land near the equator shrunk.

The most cited example is Greenland, which appears roughly the size of Africa on a Mercator map. In reality Africa is about 14 times larger, and Greenland is closer in size to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The resolution records concern that this minimises perceptions of Africa, Latin America and South Asia and understates their infrastructure needs and development potential, and describes the switch as an “act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation”.

“A fair world begins with a fair map,” Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told Reuters ahead of the vote. “A map is never neutral. It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said his ministry would stop using the Mercator map. Yaryna Ferencevych, a US representative at the UN, said the resolution mocked the purpose of the General Assembly, telling delegates the body was “debating map projects from the 16th Century” instead of focusing on international peace and prosperity.

A note on the sourcing

Ada Derana, NewsFirst and Hiru News all carried the story as the same BBC wire text, word for word. The Daily Mirror ran a CNN account instead, which names the Bahamas as a co-sponsor alongside the African Union states — a detail the BBC version omits.

Sources