Last Updated on 2 hours ago by TodayWhy Editorial
On Friday, 4 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly did something it has never done before: it voted on a map. By a margin of 164 to 1, with six abstentions, the world’s governments adopted the “Correct the Map” resolution, formally encouraging schools, media organizations, and international institutions to retire the 457-year-old Mercator projection in favor of one that shows countries at their true relative size. The United States cast the lone vote against it.
Why did the UN adopt Correct the Map, and why does a debate about map projections still have the power to produce a 164-1 vote and a furious dissent from Washington? The answer runs through four centuries of cartography, a 1970s academic feud that once made it onto primetime television, and a specific number that campaigners have used for years to make their case: Africa is roughly fourteen times larger than Greenland, even though most people who grew up looking at a standard world map would guess the two are close to the same size.
What the Correct the Map Resolution Actually Does
The resolution, introduced by Togo on behalf of the African Group and backed by the African Union and the Caribbean Community, does not ban the Mercator projection or force anyone to change anything. According to NPR’s reporting, it is not legally binding — it simply encourages wider adoption of equal-area projections, specifically naming the Equal Earth projection as a relevant option. The full text of the resolution itself is publicly available through the UN’s official documents system.
Togo’s Foreign Minister, Robert Dussey, framed the vote as being about far more than geography. “Maps shape our understanding of the world,” he told the assembly before the vote. “They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.” The African Union, celebrating the result afterward, said the resolution ensures the world map “finally reflects Africa’s true scale, weight, and place in the world.”
Why the Mercator Map Distorts the World in the First Place
To understand why this vote happened at all, it helps to understand what the Mercator projection was actually built to do — and it was never meant to be a general-purpose picture of the world. Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator designed it in 1569 to solve a specific navigational problem: on his projection, any straight line drawn on the map corresponds to a constant compass bearing, which meant sailors could plot a course and follow a single heading the entire way. That property made it enormously useful at sea, and it’s still why Mercator-style projections underpin most digital maps and navigation apps today.
The trade-off is area. Because Mercator’s grid stretches the Earth’s curved surface onto a flat rectangle, landmasses become increasingly inflated the farther they sit from the equator. Regions near the poles are blown up dramatically; regions near the equator are compressed. The starkest illustration of this is Greenland, which appears roughly comparable in size to the entire African continent on most Mercator-based world maps. In reality, Greenland covers about 2.16 million square kilometres, while Africa covers approximately 30.37 million — Africa is about fourteen times larger, not merely somewhat bigger.
Tom Patterson, one of the cartographers who would later help design the Equal Earth projection, put the practical consequence bluntly in comments carried by NPR: “If you’re using the Mercator map as a world map, say, in the classroom, students would just have a completely warped view of the size of countries in the world.”
Why This Became a Political Argument, Not Just a Technical One
The idea that a map could distort more than geography — that it could shape how seriously people take entire regions of the world — is not new, and the current campaign is walking a path first cut more than fifty years ago. In 1855, a Scottish clergyman named James Gall developed an equal-area projection that corrected Mercator’s size distortion, but it remained an academic footnote for over a century. It resurfaced in 1973, when German historian Arno Peters presented what was essentially the same mathematics as a “new invention” and framed the Mercator projection as a tool of colonial-era bias, one that had visually inflated Europe and North America at the expense of the “Global South” for centuries.
Professional cartographers reacted with a mix of amusement and irritation — pointing out that Gall’s math wasn’t new and that the resulting shapes, badly stretched and distorted near the poles, weren’t a clean win either. But the argument had already escaped academic journals. It reached mainstream pop culture decades later through a memorable subplot on the television drama The West Wing, in which a fictional advocacy group lobbies the White House to make the Peters map mandatory in American classrooms — a scene many viewers still cite as their first exposure to the idea that “the map you grew up with” was a choice, not a neutral fact of nature.
Why Equal Earth Became the Correct the Map Campaign’s Chosen Projection
If equal-area maps have existed since the 19th century, why did the UN resolution specifically point to Equal Earth rather than the older, more famous Gall-Peters projection? The answer traces back to a very concrete dispute in American education.
In March 2017, Boston Public Schools announced it would switch classroom world maps to the Gall-Peters projection specifically to give students a more accurate sense of relative country sizes. The decision reignited the old cartographic argument, and it caught the attention of three cartographers — Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny — who agreed the size problem was real but felt Gall-Peters’ answer was aesthetically rough, with continents stretched into unfamiliar, elongated shapes near the poles. Unable to find an existing equal-area projection that satisfied both accuracy and visual appeal, they built their own.
Published in August 2018, the Equal Earth projection preserves the correct relative area of every landmass — the core promise of Gall-Peters — while keeping gently curved, globe-like proportions that don’t distort continental shapes nearly as aggressively. Its first real-world use came almost immediately: NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies adopted it that same month for a global temperature-anomaly map, an early signal that the scientific community saw it as more than just a political statement. When the “Correct the Map” campaign began building momentum, Equal Earth was the natural equal-area candidate to rally around — accurate like Gall-Peters, but without the decades of aesthetic baggage attached to Arno Peters’ name.
Patterson himself seemed genuinely startled by how far the idea eventually traveled. “Wow. When we created the Equal Earth projection in 2018, we never imagined this,” he wrote after Friday’s vote.
Why the Vote Happened Now, Specifically
The Correct the Map resolution didn’t appear out of nowhere in September 2026 — it was the endpoint of an organized, multi-year campaign. Two advocacy groups, Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, launched the public push in April 2025, explicitly targeting schools first, then international organizations and media outlets. “Correcting the map is not only an African issue,” Speak Up Africa’s deputy executive director Fara Ndiaye said at the time. “It is a matter of truth and accuracy that concerns the entire world. When whole generations, in Africa and elsewhere, learn from a distorted map, they develop a biased view of Africa’s role in the world.”
The African Union, representing all 55 African member states, formally endorsed the campaign in August 2025. The Caribbean Community signed on as a co-sponsor alongside the African Group, which is why the Bahamas — not typically a country associated with African cartographic disputes — appears as one of the resolution’s named sponsors. By the time it reached the General Assembly floor a year later, the measure had enough institutional backing to pass by an overwhelming margin. Carlos Lopes, a University of Cape Town professor and prominent campaign advocate, called the result “an emotional day” in a post celebrating the 164 votes in favour.
Why the United States Was the Only Country to Vote No
Washington’s objection, laid out in a formal statement from the US Mission to the United Nations, wasn’t about cartographic accuracy at all. Deputy US representative Yaryna Ferencevych argued the resolution was inseparable from a broader ideological project, telling the assembly that debating “map projects from the 16th century, and their role in promoting reparations and ‘cognitive justice,'” distracted from the UN’s core mission. “Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote are barnacles on our work here,” the statement read, “and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.”
That framing is worth sitting with, because it reveals what the actual disagreement was about. The US delegation did not dispute that Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland, or that Mercator distorts area. Its objection was to the resolution’s own language tying the map change to concepts of historical reparation and “cognitive justice” tied to colonial-era legacies — language the US delegation read as activism rather than cartography. Six countries — a mix of Eastern European and former Soviet states — abstained rather than voting outright against the measure, without issuing comparably detailed public objections.
Why Correct the Map Might Not Change the Map on Your Wall Tomorrow
Because the Correct the Map resolution carries no binding force, its practical effect depends entirely on whether schools, publishers, and technology companies choose to act on the encouragement. There is already a precedent for how slowly — and unevenly — that kind of shift can happen. Google Maps quietly dropped the Mercator projection in favor of a rotating 3D globe on desktop back in 2018, a change most users barely noticed; the mobile app, used by far more people day to day, still defaults to Mercator. National Geographic switched its atlas maps away from a Mercator-style projection decades ago, first to the Robinson projection in 1988 and then to the Winkel Tripel projection in 1998, without any UN resolution prompting either change.
That history suggests Friday’s vote is likely to function the way its sponsors seem to intend it: not as a mandate, but as institutional cover and momentum for a shift that was already underway in pockets of education and media, now carrying the explicit backing of 164 national governments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the UN’s Correct the Map resolution actually do?
It formally encouraged, but did not require, governments, schools, media organizations, and international institutions to move away from the Mercator projection toward equal-area world maps such as Equal Earth, which show countries at their true relative size. The resolution is not legally binding.
How much bigger is Africa than it appears on a Mercator map?
Africa covers approximately 30.37 million square kilometres, compared to Greenland’s roughly 2.16 million — making Africa about fourteen times larger, despite the two appearing similar in size on most standard Mercator-based world maps.
Why did the United States vote against the Correct the Map resolution specifically?
The US delegation did not dispute the map’s size distortions. It objected to the resolution’s language linking the map change to concepts of historical reparations and “cognitive justice,” which it characterized as an ideological agenda unrelated to the UN’s core mission.
Who created the Equal Earth projection, and why?
Cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny designed it in 2018, in direct response to a 2017 decision by Boston Public Schools to adopt the older Gall-Peters projection. They wanted an equal-area map that avoided Gall-Peters’ aggressively stretched, unfamiliar shapes near the poles.
Is Equal Earth the same as the Gall-Peters projection?
No, though both are “equal-area” projections that preserve countries’ true relative sizes. Gall-Peters, developed in 1855 and popularized in 1973, distorts shapes heavily, particularly near the poles. Equal Earth was designed specifically to preserve area accuracy while keeping shapes closer to how they look on a globe.
Does this mean Google Maps and school atlases have to change now?
No. The resolution has no legal or regulatory force. Any changes depend on individual schools, publishers, and companies choosing to adopt an equal-area projection voluntarily, the same way National Geographic and Google Maps made similar changes in past decades without any UN resolution requiring it.
When did the campaign to change the map start?
The public campaign began in April 2025, led by the advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa. The African Union formally endorsed it in August 2025, and the Caribbean Community later joined as a co-sponsor of the eventual UN resolution.
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