UN General Assembly Urges the World to Stop Using Maps That Shrink Africa
The United Nations General Assembly voted 164 to 1 on September 4, 2026, to adopt a resolution encouraging governments, schools, and technology companies to move away from world maps that distort Africa's relative size. Six countries abstained. The United States was the sole country to vote against the measure NPR The Hill.
The resolution was introduced by Togo on behalf of the African Group, the bloc of 54 African member states at the UN, and was backed by the African Union NPR. Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told reporters at the General Assembly that maps "shape understanding of the world, guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions" NPR UN Web TV.
The measure is not legally binding. It does not ban the Mercator projection, the cylindrical map created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, but encourages wider adoption of equal-area projections such as Equal Earth NPR. Equal Earth was developed in 2018 by cartographers Tom Patterson, a former senior cartographer at the U.S. National Park Service, Bernhard Jenny, and Bojan Šavrič NPR.
The UN press release documenting the adoption, numbered GA/12779, links more accurate mapping to "cognitive justice, historical recognition and equitable representation" UN Press.
Deputy U.S. representative to the UN Economic and Social Council Yaryna Ferencevych accused the UN of promoting an ideological agenda and distracting from more pressing issues in her explanation of the U.S. vote NPR U.S. Mission to the UN. CNN reported that the resolution followed an African-led push for a world map reflecting countries' true relative sizes CNN.
The distortion at issue is well understood in cartographic circles. The Mercator projection preserves angles and shapes locally, which made it invaluable for maritime navigation, but it inflates the apparent size of land masses closer to the poles. Greenland appears roughly comparable to Africa on a Mercator map; in reality, Africa is about 14 times larger. This tradeoff is not a secret among mapping professionals, but the persistence of Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) as the default projection in consumer platforms from Google Maps to Mapbox has cemented the distorted view in daily use.
What the resolution does, then, is not introduce new technical knowledge. It applies diplomatic and institutional weight to a choice that, until now, has been left to individual mapmakers, textbook publishers, and platform design teams. For technology companies in particular, the resolution creates a soft but visible policy signal: the most widely used web map projection will face growing scrutiny from member states that collectively represent a majority of the General Assembly.
The U.S. decision to vote alone against a non-binding resolution that merely encourages more accurate mapping is a striking diplomatic posture. Ferencevych's framing of the resolution as ideological distraction is a characterization readers can weigh against the text itself, which speaks to representation and cognitive justice without mandating any specific compliance. The 164-to-1 margin makes the isolation clear without further commentary.
On the practical side for the technology sector, equal-area projections are already available in every major geospatial library. PROJ, D3.js, QGIS, and others support Equal Earth natively. Switching a static world map in an educational product or a corporate report from Web Mercator to Equal Earth is a trivial engineering task. Switching an interactive, pan-and-zoom web map is a different matter, because Mercator's ability to preserve local angles and shapes makes it uniquely suited for seamless zooming at street level. Any platform considering a change would likely adopt a hybrid approach: equal-area for global overviews, Mercator for local navigation.
One aspect worth noting is that the resolution's language explicitly names tech companies alongside governments and schools, placing platform design choices within the scope of an international diplomatic instrument. UN General Assembly resolutions rarely single out a specific industry category as a target for voluntary behavioral change. Whether major mapping platforms respond with visible changes, or treat the resolution as background noise, will be the concrete signal to watch.
The cartographic community has debated projection choice for decades. The Equal Earth projection was itself designed as a visually appealing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which gained prominence in the 1970s when the late German filmmaker Arno Peters championed it as a corrective to Mercator's Eurocentric distortions. The UN's adoption of a resolution favoring equal-area representations places institutional weight behind a conversation that cartographers have been having, sometimes contentiously, for over half a century.
The African Union welcomed the vote's outcome NPR. For the 54 member states of the African Group, the resolution formalizes a long-standing grievance: that the world's second-most-populous continent is systematically underrepresented in the most widely circulated visual representation of the planet.
