The United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution on Friday, led by several African nations, to adopt a map that enlarges the African continent while reducing the relative size of North America and Europe, aiming for a more accurate global geographic representation.
The measure passed with 164 votes in favor; the United States opposed it, and six other nations abstained.
The new map—known as the Equal Earth cartographic projection—”offers a more accurate representation of the sizes of continental landmasses and to this end is a relevant option for improving the accuracy of the cartographic representation of the world,” the resolution states.
It urges member states to adopt the new projection in place of the traditional Mercator map, which was designed for maritime navigation by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
The foreign minister of Togo, which drove the resolution, said maps “shape our understanding of the world.”
“They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions. They are therefore never neutral; when they present a distorted image of our planet, they risk perpetuating inaccurate representations that are passed down through generations,” Robert Dussey said at the UN.
Distorted Representation
The Mercator projection prioritized accurate depictions of shapes and angles of landmasses but sacrificed relative size accuracy—a necessary compromise when rendering a three-dimensional globe onto a two-dimensional surface. It inflated northern regions and compressed equatorial ones, making Europe and North America appear much larger, while shrinking Africa and South America.
A group of cartographers launched the Equal Earth projection in 2018. It makes Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Oceania appear vastly larger.
“Equal Earth preserves the relative surface areas of continents and, as much as possible, shows their shapes as they appear on a globe,” one of the cartographers, Bojan Savric, told AFP in 2025.
The foreign ministry of France— which co-sponsored the resolution in support of the new map—announced Friday that it would abandon the Mercator projection.
In that map, “the United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual prominence compared to Africa, Latin America or southeast Asia,” while “Greenland appears almost as big as Africa,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said.
“Changing maps obviously doesn’t change the world,” he acknowledged. “But correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth.”
The initiative comes as France is seeking to improve relations with Africa, particularly in former colonies with which it has prickly ties.
FRANCE 24 with AFP
