The UN General Assembly has backed a new world map designed to show the true proportions of the continents, challenging the centuries-old Mercator projection.
At the United Nations headquarters in New York, the General Assembly recently voted in favour of adopting a map that more accurately represents the relative size of the world’s continents.
The vote marked the culmination of a campaign that has sought for years to change the default way the world is depicted. A total of 164 countries backed the proposal, while only the United States voted against it. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Morocco, Serbia and Ukraine abstained.
The new map makes the United States appear smaller than it does on conventional maps — something that appears to have been particularly unappealing to the Trump administration and its emphasis on projecting American power, even on maps.
The Mercator problem
The distortion created by representing the Earth on a flat surface is nothing new.
In the mid-16th century, Flemish cartographer and geographer Gerardus Mercator developed a way of projecting the curved surface of the Earth onto a flat map. The aim was practical: to help sailors plot maritime routes using straight lines.
Mercator’s projection preserves the shapes and angles of land masses relatively well, but it distorts their relative size. Areas closer to the poles appear increasingly large, while regions around the equator appear disproportionately small.
That is why Greenland can look almost as large as Africa on a Mercator map, even though Africa is roughly 14 times larger.
Enter Equal Earth
The alternative backed by the UN is known as Equal Earth, a projection designed to represent the relative size of continents more accurately.
Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey, whose country is around 600 kilometres long and just 100 kilometres wide and is therefore less affected by the distortion than many other nations, told the UN that maps “shape our understanding of the world.”
“They guide education, fuel imagination and influence collective perceptions,” he said.
Togo plans to replace the maps used in its schools by the end of the year, while France has announced that it will soon follow suit.
Historians and geographers have long argued that the Mercator projection is deeply rooted in Western perspectives. Activists have taken the argument further, with some describing the phenomenon as “cartographic colonialism” and arguing that the projection has influenced perceptions of global power by visually diminishing the physical scale of the Global South.
A scientific debate, not a political one
The UN General Assembly’s vote is not legally binding, and changing a map obviously does not change the world itself.
For most countries, however, the response to the proposal — at a time when governments are dealing with far more pressing issues — appears to have been: why not?
That does not mean the Mercator projection is obsolete. Given its original purpose, it remains highly suitable for maritime and aviation navigation, where its ability to preserve angles and directions is particularly useful.
The debate, then, is less about replacing one map with another altogether than about choosing a more accurate way to understand the size and scale of the world we live in.
Be First to Comment