A new map for a new world
For 450 years, your typical map on your classroom wall, desktop screen and atlas has been somewhat distorted, and in many ways, politically biased towards the West.
Not maliciously, and not by design in the way conspiracy theories imagine, but the Mercator projection, drawn up in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to help sailors chart a straight course, has quietly shrunk Africa, Latin America and South Asia in the popular imagination ever since. On Friday 4th September 2026, the United Nations decided it was time to stop.
What actually happened with the UN vote
By a vote of 164 to one, with six abstentions, the UN General Assembly adopted the "Correct the Map" resolution — a measure put forward by Togo on behalf of the African Group and backed by the African Union, with the Bahamas also lending its name to the effort.
The resolution doesn't outlaw the Mercator map, and it isn't legally binding. Nobody is coming for the atlas in your attic. Instead, it “encourages” governments, schools, international bodies and tech companies to reach for equal-area projections — chiefly the Equal Earth map — whenever the relative size of countries and continents actually matters.
The United States cast the lone vote against, with its representative calling the resolution part of a "radical ideological project" that distracts from more pressing UN business.
Six countries (Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — abstained).
Why the Mercator map distorts the world
The Mercator projection was never built to be fair. It was built to be useful — specifically, to let 16th-century navigators plot a compass course as a straight line across a curved planet.
The trade-off is that landmasses closer to the poles balloon in apparent size, while everything near the equator is compressed.4 The result: Greenland looks roughly the same size as Africa on a standard Mercator map, when in reality Africa is around 14 times larger. Europe, similarly, appears far more dominant than its actual footprint on the globe.
Togo's Foreign Minister, Robert Dussey, has argued that this isn't a trivial quirk of geometry. Maps shape how people learn geography, how they weigh up the importance of regions, and how policymakers unconsciously rank the world. As he put it in the lead-up to the vote, a fairer world starts with a fairer map.
Africa on the traditional world map based on the Mercator projection, left, and on the 2018 Equal Earth map, right. Composite: equal-earth.com, Getty Images
Enter the Equal Earth projection
The alternative favoured by the resolution is the Equal Earth projection, an equal-area map developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny and Tom Patterson.
Unlike Mercator, it preserves the true relative size of every landmass — Brazil grows, Europe shrinks back down to scale, and Greenland finally looks like the (large, but not Africa-sized) island it is.
It isn't a perfect map — no flat projection of a sphere ever can be — but it trades navigational convenience for something arguably more important in a classroom or a newsroom: proportional truth.
Patterson, one of the map's creators, said he "never imagined" the projection would end up at the centre of a UN resolution eight years after he helped build it.
A map is never just a map
What's striking about this story is how much weight and authority a projection (essentially a mathematical trick for flattening a sphere) actually carries. A map isn't a neutral technical object. It's a claim about what matters, drawn in ink. The choice of what sits at the centre, what looks large, and what gets pushed to the margins has always said as much about the mapmaker as the territory.
In 2025 I visited the Secret World of Maps exhibition at the British Library and one of the most interesting lessons I took away was that for centuries, maps have been used to lie, distort and influence. If a trader wanted to seal a new deal, he might present a map that exaggerated his territory or showed a clear route of passage, even if the reality was something quite different.
How maps portray a landscape is something I think about often at Mapelio, where every print starts from a place someone actually cares about — a hometown, a first flat, a wedding venue, a coastline walked a hundred times. Maps are emotional objects long before they're accurate ones. This week's UN vote is a reminder that the two don't have to be in tension. Getting the proportions right doesn't make a map less personal; if anything, it makes the story it tells a little more honest.
The Mercator projection isn't going anywhere soon — it remains, as even its critics concede, genuinely useful for sea and air navigation.But for the first time, the world's governments have formally acknowledged that the map most of us grew up with was never simply "the map." It was a choice. And now there's another one sitting alongside it.
References
UN News, *"UN tells the world: Stop making Africa look small"*, 4 September 2026 — https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168284
Al Jazeera, *"UN votes to adopt new world map that reflects Africa's true size"*, 4 September 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/4/un-votes-to-adopt-new-world-map-that-reflects-africas-true-size
CNN, *"UN votes to adopt new map that makes our world look very different"*, 4 September 2026 — https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/04/world/un-vote-new-world-map-intl-scli
The Guardian, *"UN vote: world map to swap Mercator for Equal Earth projection"*, 4 September 2026 — https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/04/un-vote-world-map-mercator-equal-earth-africa
Human Rights and Legal Research Centre, *"The United Nations Votes to Correct the World Map to Better Reflect Africa's True Size"*, 4 September 2026 — https://hrlrc.org/2026/09/04/the-united-nations-votes-to-correct-world-map-that-better-reflects-africas-true-size/
NPR, *"The U.N. backs a new world map showing Africa in its true relative size"*, 4 September 2026 — https://www.npr.org/2026/09/04/nx-s1-5958611/africa-world-map-un-vote
