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The UN's new world map: what the Equal Earth resolution really means

⏱️ 18 min read

On 4 September 2026 the UN General Assembly adopted the “Correct the Map” resolution. It was tabled by Togo on behalf of the Group of African States. 164 countries voted in favour, the United States alone voted against, and six countries abstained: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine. The vote crowned an African-led campaign against the world map in the Mercator projection, which has made Africa look small for centuries.

The resolution is non-binding and bans nothing. It encourages governments, schools, international organisations, media and technology companies to use equal-area maps (maps that keep the true proportions of area), particularly the Equal Earth projection, wherever comparing the size of continents matters. It also calls for teaching that every flat map distorts something. Mercator stays where it genuinely belongs: navigation.

Quick check

Which is larger in reality: Africa or Greenland?

The key facts at a glance

What was adopted: the resolution “Correct the map: rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world's regions, particularly Africa”, adopted from draft A/80/L.104.
When: 4 September 2026, during the 80th session of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Who tabled it: Togo, on behalf of the Group of African States, building on the #CorrectTheMap campaign already backed by the African Union.
The vote: 164 in favour, 1 against (the US), 6 abstentions. 22 of the 193 member states did not vote.
Legal force: none. General Assembly resolutions are recommendations, not orders.
What it recommends: wider use of equal-area maps, especially Equal Earth, when comparing the size of landmasses, and teaching the limits of flat maps.
What it does not change: borders, the status of territories, or navigation. The European Union stressed in its explanation of vote that the scope is strictly educational.

Where the dispute comes from: a map designed for sailors

Gerardus Mercator published his world map in 1569 in Duisburg. Its Latin title said plainly what it was for: a description of the world ad usum navigantium, “for the use of navigators”. Mercator built the grid to preserve angles. As a result, a line of constant compass bearing, a rhumb line, is straight on his map. A navigator could lay down a ruler, read off a bearing and sail. In the sixteenth century it was breakthrough technology.

That advantage has a price. To keep angles true, Mercator had to stretch the map vertically exactly as much as it is stretched horizontally. On a globe the meridians converge at the poles, but on Mercator's map they run parallel. The farther from the equator, the larger the stretch. Linear scale grows as 1/cos(latitude), and area scale as its square:

At the equator the scale is true: Congo, Kenya and Indonesia keep their real proportions.
At the latitude of Warsaw or Berlin (about 52°) lengths are inflated about 1.6 times and areas about 2.7 times.
In central Greenland (about 72°) areas are already inflated about 10 times.
On Svalbard (about 78°) the factor is almost 24.
The poles lie at infinity, so a Mercator map can never show them. It is usually cut off somewhere between 80° and 85° latitude.

This is not Mercator's mistake; it is mathematics. In 1827 Carl Friedrich Gauss proved that a sphere cannot be flattened onto a plane without distortion. Every world map therefore has to sacrifice something: angles, areas, distances or shapes. We explore this in Why all maps of the world lie and The orange-peel dilemma.

Africa versus Greenland: the numbers that explain everything

The most famous example is the Greenland illusion. On a Mercator map the island looks roughly as big as Africa. In reality Greenland covers about 2.17 million km² and Africa about 30.37 million km². Africa is about 14 times larger. See it on the Greenland vs Africa overlay.

The illusion does not stop with Greenland:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (2.34 million km²) and Algeria (2.38 million km²) are each larger than Greenland, although on Mercator it is Greenland that looks several times bigger.
Africa can hold the United States, China, India and the entire European Union, with about 3.4 million km² still to spare.
Russia looks bigger than Africa on Mercator, yet Africa is almost 1.8 times larger.
Africa could fit nearly 97 Polands.

For a detailed breakdown, read How big is Africa; for where our area figures come from, see the data methodology.

How a navigation chart ended up in classrooms and on screens

If the Mercator map was made for sailors, how did it become the “default portrait of the world”? A few practical reasons added up. A rectangular map with a straight grid and north at the top fits neatly on a wall, in an atlas and on a printed page. For centuries publishers copied it because it was familiar and easy to handle. Generations of pupils grew used to its proportions.

Cartographers have long objected. In 1989 several leading North American geographic and cartographic associations urged an end to rectangular world maps in general education and the media. That covered both Mercator and its loud rival, the Gall-Peters map.

The internet gave Mercator a second life. When Google Maps launched in 2005, it chose a variant called Web Mercator. At street level that is a sound choice: junctions keep their correct angles and streets are not sheared. Zoomed out to the whole world, the same property inflates the north again. That is why in 2018 Google began showing a globe in the browser when you zoom out. We cover this in Should Google Maps use a globe?.

Timeline: from Peters to the General Assembly

1973: Arno Peters presents an equal-area projection, described earlier by James Gall (1855), as the “fair map of the world”. The first great public debate on the politics of maps begins. We tell that story in Mercator vs Gall-Peters.
1989: American cartographic associations call for rectangular world maps to be dropped from education.
March 2017: Boston Public Schools replace Mercator with the Gall-Peters map. The decision makes headlines worldwide.
2018: responding to the Boston debate, Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny publish the Equal Earth projection: equal-area, yet close in look to the popular Robinson projection.
2024 and 2025: Africa No Filter (led by Moky Makura) and Speak Up Africa (co-founded by Fara Ndiaye) create the #CorrectTheMap campaign. It launches publicly in April 2025, calls on the UN, the World Bank and media such as the BBC to switch to Equal Earth, and gathers signatures on a petition.
Summer 2025: the African Union Commission formally backs the campaign. It was widely reported in August 2025, with the Commission's Deputy Chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi as the face of the endorsement.
February 2026: heads of state and government at the AU Assembly's 39th ordinary session endorse the Togo-led initiative. They recognise Equal Earth as a fairer standard and encourage member states to review school curricula. Togo takes the issue to the UN.
4 September 2026: the UN General Assembly adopts the resolution with 164 votes in favour, 1 against and 6 abstentions.
The same day: French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announces that French diplomacy is dropping Mercator from its official maps. It chooses not Equal Earth, though, but another equal-area projection: Eckert IV.

What the resolution actually says

According to official UN communications, the resolution:

recognises the distortions inherent in the Mercator projection, which symbolically diminish Africa and other equatorial regions;
encourages wider use of equal-area maps, particularly Equal Earth, in contexts where comparing the size of continents matters;
addresses its encouragement to governments, educational institutions, international organisations, media and technology platforms;
calls for teaching the limitations of any flat map representing a spherical planet;
places the issue in a wider frame of “cognitive justice”, historical recognition and equitable representation of the world's regions.

Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey summed it up in a line quoted around the world: “A fair map does not change the geography of the world; it changes how we see the world.” He added that maps guide education, nourish the imagination and shape collective perceptions.

What the resolution does NOT do

The vote produced plenty of overblown headlines, so it is worth listing what the document does not contain:

It does not ban the Mercator map. Sea and air navigation, street maps and many regional maps can keep using it.
It is not law. No country, school or company has to change anything.
It does not order Google, Apple or anyone else to rebuild their apps. Phone navigation will keep running on Web Mercator, because at high zoom it is simply a good solution.
It does not change borders or the status of territories. A projection is a mathematical formula; borders are drawn by the publisher of a particular map.
It does not designate one “official” world map. The European Union noted that the resolution does not endorse any specific website, such as equal-earth.com, or the maps it contains.

Who voted against, and why some abstained

The United States voted no. Yaryna Ferencevych, Deputy U.S. Representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, said the resolution “mocks the work and purpose of this institution”. In her view, instead of focusing on real problems of peace and prosperity, the Assembly was debating 16th-century map projections and their role in promoting reparations and “cognitive justice”. She added that the text belongs to a “much larger and more radical ideological project”. She called such resolutions “barnacles” on the UN's work and a reason the institution is losing its credibility.

Ukraine abstained. It explained that Equal Earth maps depict its occupied territories in a manner that is “wholly unacceptable” and at odds with the Assembly's resolutions on Crimea. This neatly shows the difference between a projection and a map. Equal Earth itself is only a recipe for flattening a sphere; colours and borders are added by whoever makes a particular file. For that reason the EU explicitly separated its support for equal-area maps from the maps published on the project's website.

Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Serbia also abstained. According to the UN's meeting coverage their delegations did not speak, so we will not guess at their motives.

The European Union supported the aim, but in its explanation of vote stressed that the scope is “strictly limited” to education, awareness-raising and geographical literacy. It does not touch sovereignty, delimitation or recognised borders.

What the Equal Earth projection is

Equal Earth was designed in 2018 by three cartographers: Bojan Šavrič (Esri), Tom Patterson (US National Park Service) and Bernhard Jenny (Monash University). Their paper “The Equal Earth map projection” appeared in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. The trigger was the Boston schools decision. Patterson felt the world needed an equal-area map that pupils and teachers would not reject for its odd-looking shapes.

Its key features:

Equal area: a region twice as large in reality takes up twice the space on the map. This is exactly the property the resolution is about.
Pseudocylindrical shape: parallels are straight horizontal lines, so latitudes are easy to compare. Meridians curve towards the edges, and the poles are short lines. The whole map has proportions of about 2.05 : 1.
A look close to the Robinson projection: continents look “familiar”, without the vertical stretching typical of Gall-Peters.
Simple formulas: the projection is defined by short polynomials, so it is easy to program and fast to compute. It is supported by the common GIS tools and mapping libraries, including the one that powers the maps on RealSize.World.

Equal Earth has its price too. Shapes near the side edges and at high latitudes are sheared and flattened, for example Alaska, Kamchatka and New Zealand. Distances and angles are not true, so it is no good for navigation. We tell the story of its creation in The Equal Earth projection: a modern answer to map distortion.

Equal Earth among other world maps

The resolution above all promotes the whole class of equal-area maps, with Equal Earth as the prime example. The alternatives show why:

Mercator (1569) is conformal and distorts area very strongly. It is excellent for navigation and street maps, poor for comparing continents.
Gall-Peters (1855/1973) is equal-area and cylindrical. Continents near the equator are clearly stretched vertically.
Mollweide (1805) is an equal-area ellipse, popular in astronomy and climatology. Shapes near its edges are heavily sheared.
Eckert IV (1906) is equal-area and pseudocylindrical with rounded sides. It is French diplomacy's choice: in the spirit of the resolution, though not Equal Earth.
Robinson (1963) is a compromise: attractive and familiar, but not equal-area, so it does not meet the resolution's main ask.
Winkel Tripel is also a compromise, National Geographic's world-map standard since 1998. It balances distortions well but does not preserve area.
Equal Earth (2018) is equal-area and pseudocylindrical with natural-looking shapes. It combines the strength of Gall-Peters with the look of Robinson.

You can compare all of them in our projection catalog. To practise recognising them by eye, try the Name the projection quiz.

What changes in practice

Schools and textbooks: the resolution gives teachers and publishers a strong argument but no obligation. Wall maps and atlases change slowly, usually with new editions. The African Union has encouraged its members to review curricula. Elsewhere the decision rests with education authorities and publishers.
Media and science: equal-area maps have been good practice on thematic maps (population, climate, crops, emissions) for years. The resolution reinforces that.
Map apps: phone navigation will stay on Web Mercator. Any change is more likely in whole-world views, infographics and data dashboards.
Diplomacy and administration: France shows that governments can switch their official maps at once. They can also pick an equal-area projection other than Equal Earth.

What about countries like Poland, Germany or the UK? Headlines saying they “get smaller” miss the point: they do not shrink, they simply stop being artificially inflated. On Mercator a country lying between 49° and 55° latitude, like Poland, is pumped up by a factor of roughly 2.3 to 3 relative to equatorial countries. On Equal Earth it returns to true proportions: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, turns out to be about 7.5 times larger than Poland.

Is this the end of Mercator? No, and that is fine

The most sensible lesson from the resolution is not “Mercator is bad”. It is: pick the map that fits the question.

Plotting a ship's or aircraft's course? Mercator (constant bearing) or a gnomonic map (shortest route). More in Gnomonic vs Mercator.
Comparing country sizes, or showing data on a world map? An equal-area map such as Equal Earth.
Want to see the world with no compromises at all? Only a globe will do. The closest flat equivalent is the orthographic projection, which shows only half the Earth at a time.

Every projection has its own “error atlas”. We explain how to read one in How to read map distortion.

Criticism and open questions

Are maps a matter for the UN? The US says no: it is symbolism and ideology instead of real problems. African states say yes: the picture of the world billions of children learn from shapes how we perceive a continent of more than 1.4 billion people.
Is Equal Earth the “true” map? It is true in area, but not in shape, distance or angle. A perfect flat map does not and cannot exist.
What about the centre of the map? Equal Earth is usually drawn with the Greenwich meridian in the middle, which puts Europe at the centre. The resolution does not address this, although it is a separate and interesting question of perspective. Try our World center tool and read about a world map centred on Australia.
Will changing the map change anything? Minister Barrot, quoted by Al Jazeera, said that changing maps obviously does not change the world, but correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth.

See for yourself: 6 experiments on RealSize.World

Open the Mercator map and drag Greenland down to the equator. Watch it “melt”.
Do the same on the Equal Earth map. Here Greenland keeps the same size wherever you put it.
Overlay Greenland and Africa, then Greenland and DR Congo.
Test your intuition with the Size illusion quiz. Do you score better after reading this?
Go back 500 million years and see how Africa sat at the heart of the supercontinent Gondwana.
Put any country at the centre of the map with the World center tool.

Frequently asked questions

Did the UN ban the Mercator map? No. The resolution bans nothing. It encourages equal-area maps where the size of landmasses is compared. Mercator remains the right choice for navigation.

Do schools have to replace their maps? No. A General Assembly resolution is not binding. Decisions on school materials are made by national education authorities and publishers.

Will Google Maps switch to Equal Earth? Nothing forces it to. Navigation works best on Web Mercator at high zoom, and for whole-world views Google has shown a globe in the browser since 2018.

Why Equal Earth rather than Gall-Peters? Both preserve area, but Gall-Peters stretches shapes strongly in the vertical. Equal Earth was designed to be equal-area and look natural at the same time.

Is Africa really 14 times bigger than Greenland? Yes. Africa covers about 30.37 million km² and Greenland about 2.17 million km². The ratio is almost exactly 14.