The United Nations General Assembly has backed a resolution promoting the Equal Earth map projection, which provides a more accurate representation of the relative sizes of continents.
The resolution received support from 164 countries, while the United States voted against it and six countries abstained.
The resolution describes Equal Earth as a map projection that offers a more accurate depiction of the sizes of continental landmasses and encourages member states to consider using it instead of the traditional Mercator projection.
The Mercator projection was developed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 and was primarily designed for maritime navigation.
Togo, which led the initiative, said maps play an important role in shaping how people understand the world.
“Maps shape our understanding of the world,” Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told the UN, arguing that distorted representations can contribute to inaccurate perceptions that are passed from one generation to another.
The Mercator projection accurately preserves the shapes and angles of land masses in many contexts, but it significantly distorts their relative areas because of the difficulty of representing the three-dimensional Earth on a two-dimensional surface.
As a result, regions closer to the poles appear disproportionately large, while areas near the equator are reduced in size. This makes countries and continents such as Europe and North America appear larger than they are relative to Africa and South America.
Cartographers introduced the Equal Earth projection in 2018 as an alternative that preserves the relative surface areas of continents while maintaining their overall shapes as closely as possible.
Cartographer Bojan Savric, one of its creators, previously said the projection was designed to preserve the relative areas of continents while showing their shapes in a way that resembles their appearance on a globe.
France, which co-sponsored the resolution, also announced plans to stop using the Mercator projection.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the traditional map gives disproportionate visual prominence to countries such as the United States, Russia and China compared with Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, while Greenland appears nearly as large as Africa.
“Changing maps obviously doesn’t change the world,” Barrot said, adding that correcting an inaccurate representation was nevertheless an important step.
The initiative comes as France seeks to strengthen its relations with African countries, including several former colonies where ties have remained strained.
