UN Pushes New World Map to Reflect Real Continental Sizes

On a crisp Friday in early September, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a proposal that may finally put a long‑standing cartographic bias to rest. Spearheaded by a bloc of African countries, the resolution calls for member states to replace the familiar Mercator map with a newer design called the Equal Earth projection.

The vote was almost unanimous – 164 nations in favour, the United States alone opposing, and six others opting to abstain. While the numbers look impressive, the real story lies in what the new map actually does: it redraws the world so that continents appear in proportion to their true surface area, rather than the distorted silhouettes we’ve grown accustomed to.

For centuries the Mercator projection, invented by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, has been the default for everything from school atlases to airline navigation screens. Its strength was in preserving angles and making sea routes straight lines, but that came at a cost. By stretching the poles, it turned Europe and North America into giants, while shrinking Africa, South America and much of Asia to almost toy‑size. Greenland, for instance, looks roughly the same size as Africa – a visual illusion that many still believe.

The Equal Earth projection, first unveiled by a team of cartographers in 2018, seeks to correct that illusion. It keeps the recognizable shapes of landmasses but scales them so that the area each continent occupies on the map mirrors its actual share of the globe. As Bojan Savrić, one of the designers, explained back in 2025, “Equal Earth preserves relative surface areas and, as much as possible, shows their shapes as they appear on a globe.”

Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign minister and a driving force behind the resolution, reminded delegates that maps do more than point out where things are – they shape how we think about the world. “They guide education, nourish imagination, and influence collective perceptions,” he said at the podium. A distorted map, he warned, can perpetuate misconceptions that linger for generations.

France, which co‑sponsored the resolution, announced it would retire the Mercator from its official publications. “The United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual prominence compared to Africa, Latin America or southeast Asia,” French Foreign Minister Jean‑Noël Barrot noted. “Changing maps doesn’t change the world, but correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth.” The move also fits into a broader French effort to mend ties with former African colonies.

Will the new projection become the global standard? Only time will tell. Yet the vote signals a growing awareness that the way we picture the planet matters – not just for aesthetics, but for equity, education and a more honest worldview.