EXPLAINER
Pick which country is bigger, then watch it morph from Mercator to Equal Earth projection to see how close you were.
The map of Africa is much larger than most people think. However, most classroom maps and atlases still understate it – a distortion embedded in the Mercator projection that has shaped world maps for more than four centuries.
The distortion in question is not subtle. On a Mercator map, which was designed for European colonial exploration and maritime trade in the ۱۶th century, Greenland appears roughly the size of Africa, which is actually about ۱۴ times larger.
The exaggeration increases the farther you travel from the equator, so it falls almost entirely on one half of the world, inflating Europe, including Russia, and North America while shrinking Africa, Latin America and South Asia.
To address this, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted ۱۶۴ to ۱ on Friday to adopt a resolution promoting the Equal Earth projection, which shows continents in their true proportions, as an alternative to Mercator.
Led by Togo on behalf of the African Group and backed by the African Union, it encourages schools, institutions and tech companies to switch, correcting the shrinking of Africa and other equatorial regions. The African Group is the largest regional voting and dialogue bloc at the UN, consisting of ۵۴ African Union member states.
Map quiz: Pick the bigger country
See it for yourself: pick which country is bigger, then watch it morph from Mercator to Equal Earth to see how close you were.
How did countries vote?
The United States was the only country to vote against the resolution calling the measure a “radical ideological project”. Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine abstained.
US representative Yaryna Ferencevych said before the vote that the resolution is “the reason this institution is losing its credibility”. “Instead of focusing on genuine problems … this body is debating map projects from the ۱۶th century,” she said.
Friday’s resolution is nonbinding, intended only to encourage the world’s default maps to change. The UN said it does not ban Mercator or impose a replacement, but simply encourages wider use of the Equal Earth projection.
Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told the UNGA that maps shape education, imagination and collective perception, and that the resolution affirms African reality.
The African Union adopted Equal Earth in March. Togo is planning a meeting in Lome early next year, with UNESCO, the African Union and technology companies including Google, to work out what implementation looks like in practice.
Why flat maps lie
Every flat map lies because the Earth is a sphere and no projection can flatten it without distorting something: shape, area, distance or direction.
Gerardus Mercator, a cartographer and geographer who published the world map in ۱۵۶۹, chose to preserve angles and straight bearings, a trade-off that made sense for ۱۶th-century ships but has kept shaping perceptions of the world for nearly ۵۰۰ years since. Equal Earth makes the opposite trade-off, preserving true area so continents can be compared honestly, at the cost of slightly bending their outlines.
