Yesterday, September 4, the General Assembly took an important step toward correcting the distortions found in commonly used world maps, particularly in the Mercator projection, which is believed to misrepresent the relative sizes of the continents and contribute to an underrepresentation of Africa and other equatorial regions.
The resolution is titled “Correcting the Map: Rebalancing Global Cartographic Representation and Promoting Equitable Representation of the World’s Regions, in Particular Africa” (document A/80/L.104), and was adopted with 164 votes in favor, 1 against (the United States), and 6 abstentions (Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine).
The document calls for wider use of equal-area map projections—particularly the Equal Earth projection—in contexts where the comparative sizes of continents are relevant, framing the issue as more than just a technical cartographic problem.
The United States’ objection that the resolution was “highly ideological” was dismissed as ridiculous by scholars and member states. The issue of the Eurocentric projection created by Mercator in 1600 (a projection that was absolutely revolutionary for its time, as it was the first attempt to scientifically depict the entire planet on a single map) was called into question by James Gall as early as 1855, but it was thanks to the work of Arno Peters that Gall’s projection was published in 1974 and became the first projection in which one square centimeter on the map corresponds to an exact proportion of one square kilometer of territory.
Source: https://press.un.org/en/2026/ga12779.doc.htm
