The United Nations General Assembly voted Friday to adopt a resolution urging a shift away from the 16th-century Mercator projection toward a world map that more accurately reflects countries’ true geographic size. The resolution, sponsored by African states, frames the change as a matter of correcting long-standing distortions that have diminished the visual prominence of Africa and other equatorial regions in classrooms, institutional publications, and media imagery worldwide.
The measure does not impose a binding replacement map. Instead, it encourages UN institutions, member states, schools, and media organizations to adopt maps that more faithfully represent the relative size of countries. Alternatives such as the Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018, and the Robinson projection have been promoted by cartographers as more balanced representations of landmass, though the resolution does not endorse a single replacement.
What Happened
The resolution was sponsored by African Union member states and passed during a session of the General Assembly on Friday. It argues that the continued dominance of the Mercator projection reinforces a “false impression” of the continent’s global standing. Proponents have framed the cartographic shift as a question of perception, representation, and the visibility of the Global South in educational and institutional materials.
The vote marks the formal entry of the United Nations into a debate that has gathered momentum since the early 2010s, when a coalition of African and South American geographers began pressing international institutions to reassess the maps they publish and circulate.
Why It Matters
The Mercator projection, developed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, was designed for maritime navigation. It preserves angles and shapes at the expense of accurate area representation, a design feature that made it indispensable for sailors crossing open oceans but has produced dramatic distortions on wall maps and classroom displays ever since.
The visual consequences are pronounced. Landmasses near the poles, including Greenland, Europe, and North America, appear far larger than they are in reality. Africa and South America, by contrast, appear comparatively shrunken. Africa, the world’s second-largest continent by area at roughly 30.4 million square kilometers, is commonly rendered smaller than Greenland on Mercator maps, despite being approximately 14 times larger. Greenland covers about 2.16 million square kilometers.
Critics of the projection argue that these distortions carry symbolic and political weight. A continent that is home to more than 1.4 billion people, contains 54 sovereign states, and spans territory that would accommodate the United States, China, India, and most of Europe combined has, for centuries, been rendered visually subordinate on the world’s most reproduced image: the rectangular wall map.
Background and Context
The campaign to retire the Mercator projection has gained traction in recent years, driven in part by African civil society groups, geographic organizations, and a small but vocal community of cartographers. The African Union has previously called on member states to phase out Mercator-based maps in classrooms and official communications in favor of more equitable projections.
The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by Croatian cartographer Bojan Šavrič and colleagues, has emerged as a leading alternative. It is an equal-area pseudocylindrical projection, meaning it preserves the relative size of landmasses while accepting some shape distortion at the edges. The Robinson projection, introduced in 1963 by Arthur H. Robinson, represents an earlier attempt to compromise between area accuracy and visual familiarity and is already used by National Geographic and several educational publishers.
The broader cartographic debate intersects with longstanding critiques of how the Global South is represented in global institutions. African diplomats and scholars have argued that maps published by international bodies shape perceptions of economic, political, and cultural weight, and that the persistence of a 16th-century European navigational tool as the default global image sends a subtle but persistent message about whose world the map is designed to represent.
Analysis: The resolution is largely symbolic. It carries no enforcement mechanism and does not mandate the immediate replacement of existing maps. Its significance lies in amplifying a long-running debate over how cartographic choices shape global perception. By securing UN backing, African states have elevated a technical cartographic question into a matter of representation and historical framing, aligning the campaign with broader efforts within the African Union to assert greater visibility in international institutions and discourse. The vote may accelerate the adoption of alternative projections in UN publications, educational curricula, and public-facing materials, though compliance will depend on individual institutions and national governments.
What to Watch Next
Whether UN agencies and specialized bodies, including UNESCO, the UN Statistics Division, and the cartographic sections of the Secretariat, begin adopting Equal Earth or comparable projections in their published materials in the months following the vote.
Whether national education ministries, particularly in African Union member states, follow through on earlier pledges to remove Mercator-based maps from primary and secondary school curricula.
The response of major publishers, including National Geographic, Google Maps, and Apple Maps, whose default web and mobile map renderings continue to rely on Mercator-derived projections for navigation purposes, even as they have introduced alternative views for thematic contexts.
Whether the resolution triggers a coordinated effort to update atlases, textbooks, and reference materials produced by international bodies, or remains confined to a declaratory gesture.
Conclusion
The General Assembly’s adoption of the resolution represents a notable, if largely symbolic, milestone in a multi-decade effort to challenge the dominance of the Mercator projection. Whether the vote translates into measurable change in how the world is drawn, taught, and circulated will depend on decisions made by institutions, publishers, and education ministries in the months and years ahead.
Sources
France24 News — https://www.france24.com/en/video/20260905-un-approves-resolution-in-support-of-map-that-shows-africa-s-true-size
Source: France24 News
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Story synopsis gathered from: France24 News — source
