The United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote Friday on whether to endorse a world map that more accurately depicts the size of Africa.
A resolution favors the Equal Earth projection, a map that supporters say shows the true size of countries, over the familiar Mercator map, which shrinks regions near the Equator.
The new map has supporters in Africa, who say the Mercator projection has contributed to a historical bias that has minimized tropical and equatorial regions and exaggerated the size of countries near the poles.
The resolution, if adopted, would not outlaw the Mercator projection or require the use of the Equal Earth map. But it is part of a campaign to raise awareness of the effects of visual representations of Earth on how people view the world.
Here’s what to know about the debate.
What is the Mercator projection?
The projection, one of many ways to represent the spherical Earth on a flat plane, was designed by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 to help sailors navigate.
It was created by projecting the Earth’s features onto a cylinder, then flattening that into a rectangle.
The map was invaluable for seafaring: Any straight line drawn on the map represents a compass direction that sailors can use to determine which way to go. The projection has since become widely used in books, classrooms and online services like Google Maps.
Why do critics want to move away from it?
Every map projection makes sacrifices, like shape, size or distance: You can’t flatten a round object without somehow stretching, shrinking or tearing it. The Mercator projection reflects true directions but distorts the size of landmasses.
If you had a Mercator projection on your classroom wall, you might have grown up believing that Greenland, for example, is as big as Africa, even though it is one-fourteenth its size. You might also think that Alaska is bigger than Mexico, when it is 25 percent smaller.
Critics have argued that the Mercator map creates a subtle bias whereby northern nations, including some of the world’s wealthiest, appear large and equatorial regions, home mostly to developing countries, are depicted as small. Some cartographers say it reinforces a Eurocentric and colonial worldview.
The Equal Earth projection — created in 2018 by the cartographers Bojan Savric, Bernhard Jenny and Tom Patterson — sacrifices straight-line directions in order to render landmasses in their correct proportions. It has rounded edges to account for the Earth’s spherical shape instead of a rectangle.
Advocacy groups in Africa have campaigned to replace the Mercator map since April 2025. The African Union endorsed the campaign in August that year, urging its 55 member states to adopt the Equal Earth map in schools and public communications. The West African nation of Togo sponsored the U.N. resolution, backed by other countries in the African Union.
“A map is never neutral,” Robert Dussey, the foreign minister of Togo, said on Thursday, promoting the U.N. resolution. “It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood and may, sometimes from the earliest years of schooling, perpetuate representations that do not correspond to geographic reality.”
What would the U.N. resolution do?
The resolution before the U.N. General Assembly on Friday urges the more than 190 member states to update their educational materials and educate students about the accurate sizes of countries and the limitations of different map projections.
It also urges major digital map providers to discuss the issue with governments and adopt more accurate cartographic representations.
The resolution is not binding. But the push to replace the Mercator map has made progress in other ways.
Google, which used a Mercator-based map for more than a decade, shifted in 2018 to showing the Earth as a globe when zoomed out on the desktop platform. “Greenland’s projection is no longer the size of Africa,” the company said on social media.
Some schools have begun replacing Mercator maps. Boston Public Schools in 2017 began purchasing maps with the Peters projection, which shows countries in their correct proportional sizes to one another at the cost of stretching and squashing their outlines.
The shift was part of the district’s effort to “decolonize the curriculum,” Colin Rose, then a district administrator, told The Boston Globe.
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