The UN Just Voted to Stop Making Africa Look Small on the Map
On September 4, 2026, the General Assembly backed a resolution urging schools, governments and tech platforms to swap the 456-year-old Mercator map for Equal Earth, a projection that shows every country at its true relative size.
September 5, 2026 · 5 min read
Most people have never questioned the world map hanging in their old classroom. It is the one where Greenland looks about the same size as Africa, where Europe sits comfortably in the middle, and where everything near the poles seems to swell far beyond its actual footprint. That map has a name, the Mercator projection, and on September 4, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to stop treating it as the default.
The vote was not close. A resolution known as "Correct the Map" passed 164 to 1, with six abstentions. It urges the world's governments, schools and technology platforms to consider replacing Mercator, wherever relative size matters, with the Equal Earth projection, a map built specifically to show every country and continent at its true proportion to the others.
What the UN actually voted on
The resolution was introduced by Togo on behalf of the African Group, the 54 African member states at the UN, with the backing of the African Union. It describes the effort as an act of "cognitive justice and memorial reparation," language that ties the campaign directly to the map's colonial-era origins.
The final tally: 164 countries in favor, one against (the United States), and six abstentions, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine. Those six abstentions were not random. Several of them are states with territory currently contested or occupied by Russia, and their reasoning turned out to have little to do with Africa at all, more on that below.
Why Africa looks too small on the map you grew up with
The Mercator projection was drawn in 1569 by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, and it was never meant to be a fair picture of the world. It was built for sailors. Mercator's genius was a map on which a straight line drawn between two points holds a constant compass bearing, which made it enormously useful for navigation at sea. The tradeoff is that it inflates the size of anything far from the equator, and the distortion compounds the farther you go.
The practical effect: on a standard Mercator map, Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Africa is about 14 times larger. Russia, Canada and parts of Europe are similarly oversized relative to the continents nearer the equator, which include most of Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. The resolution is careful to note it does not challenge Mercator's continued use for maritime and aerial navigation, where it remains genuinely well suited. The objection is to its use as an all-purpose classroom and reference map, a role it was never designed for.
What Equal Earth actually is
Equal Earth is not brand new. It was created in 2018 by three cartographers working together: Bojan Šavrič at Esri, Tom Patterson formerly of the US National Park Service, and Bernhard Jenny at Monash University in Australia. It is what cartographers call an equal-area pseudocylindrical projection, meaning it preserves the true relative size of every landmass, no country is stretched larger or shrunk smaller than its actual share of the Earth's surface.
Visually, it borrows the gently curved, rounded look of the Robinson projection, a map that has long been popular for its aesthetics but which is not equal-area and still distorts size. Equal Earth was designed to solve that problem: keep the pleasant, familiar curvature people respond well to, while making the underlying math accurate. It also improves on an older equal-area alternative, the Gall-Peters projection, which is accurate on size but stretches shapes noticeably near the poles in a way many found visually jarring. The project is still actively maintained, its most recent release, version 1.4, came out on June 22, 2026.
"A fair map does not change the geography of the world"
Togo's foreign minister, Robert Dussey, made the case for the resolution in terms that went beyond cartography. Maps, he argued, are not neutral. They shape how children learn to see the world before they ever set foot outside their own country.
Togo has committed to being the first country to act on its own resolution, updating its school geography textbooks to Equal Earth. Dussey framed it as setting an example: "In the classroom, we need to change it to give an example to all the countries in the world." France had already announced plans to drop Mercator from its official world maps ahead of the vote, suggesting the shift was gaining momentum well before the UN weighed in.
A fair map does not change the geography of the world. It changes how we see the world.
Not everyone agreed, and not for the reason you'd expect
The United States cast the only vote against the resolution. Its representative dismissed it as a "barnacle" on the UN's work, calling it part of "a much larger and more radical ideological project" and arguing that resolutions like it are "the reason this institution is losing its credibility."
Russia's representative spoke in favor, framing support for the resolution as part of Moscow's stated commitment to "overcoming colonialism's legacy" and backing African efforts toward historic justice. That is where the story gets more complicated. Ukraine's objection had nothing to do with Africa's size on the map. Ukraine's representative said that digital versions of the Equal Earth projection used by some mapping tools depict Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation in a way that is "wholly unacceptable" and inconsistent with existing UN resolutions on Crimea, hence Ukraine's abstention, joined by Georgia, Moldova and other states with their own contested borders.
Ireland, speaking for the European Union, backed the resolution but drew a hard line around its scope, stressing that it is limited strictly to "education, awareness-raising and geographical literacy," not a statement on any disputed territory.
What actually changes, and what doesn't
Nothing changes automatically. The resolution is not legally binding, and it does not require any single classroom, government office or technology platform to update its maps. Each organization is left to decide for itself whether to adopt Equal Earth, choose a different equal-area projection, or keep using Mercator for the purposes it was designed for. What the vote does is put the UN's institutional weight behind the idea that, for teaching and general reference, an equal-area map is the more honest choice, and it puts a specific, well-tested alternative on the table.
See the real size for yourself
The easiest way to understand why any of this matters is to look at the numbers directly. Africa covers roughly 30.3 million square kilometers, more than the United States, China, India and most of Europe combined, yet on a Mercator map it can look barely larger than Greenland's 2.2 million square kilometers. If you want to explore how countries actually compare once the distortion is stripped away, DodoThinks' country size and population rankings and largest and smallest countries page lay out the real figures side by side, and the world map game is a genuinely useful way to build an intuitive, corrected sense of where everything actually sits and how big it actually is.