UN adopts major map reform to show true scale of continents

The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday for a resolution spearheaded by several African countries to adopt a map that makes their continent bigger while shrinking North America and Europe — aiming at “a more accurate representation” of world geography.

The resolution was backed by 164 countries while the United States voted against it and six other states 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 says.

It urges member states to adopt the new map in place of the traditional Mercator projection, 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.”

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“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 representation that are passed down through generation,” Robert Dussey said at the UN.

‘Distorted representation’

The Mercator projection focused on accurate depictions of the shapes and angles of land masses, but their relative sizes were often inaccurate — in part due to the challenge of rendering a three-dimensional globe onto a two-dimensional map.

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-Noel 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.