Africa and the World Map: Six Things Everyone Got Wrong About the UN Vote

At top left, a map using the Mercator projection shows northern regions and Antarctica very large compared to tropical regions, but all in familiar shapes, with the label saying it was invented in the 1500s for navigation, and is mostly discouraged by the UN. At top right, a world map in the Equal Earth projection, without any countries exaggerated in size, but with Africa and other continents appearing to be somewhat stretched or squished - label says it was invented in 2018 as the newest way to preserve country sizes, and is encouraged by the UN for some uses. At bottom left, a world map in the Robinson projection, where northern regions and Antarctica are somewhat exaggerated in size, but much less so than in the Mercator, and the shapes of continents are similar to in Mercator except for some distortion towards the left and right ends. At bottom right, an image simulating a globe with the view centered on Africa, showing that the continent's true shape is indeed closest to that seen in the Mercator and Robinson projections.

Graphic by PolGeoNow, starting from maps by Geordie Bosanko, Justin Kunimune, Canuckguy, and Martin23230. You can take and use this image for free, as long as you follow the rules of the CC BY-SA license, and link back to our site when possible – but please consider buying us a coffee if it's useful to you!

Article by Evan Centanni

Maps at the United Nations: What Really Happened

The internet has gone wild this month with news about a United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolution, passed on September 4, to endorse what headlines called a “new world map”. (A General Assembly resolution is a kind of official statement about what most of the world’s countries think or want.)

Unfortunately, most reporting on the UN action has been a mix of exaggerations, misunderstandings, and bad simplifications, with people getting mostly the wrong impressions about what happened. And as in past cases, the media mostly didn’t interview the actual map experts. But not to worry – we have one of those here!

PolGeoNow founder and editor Evan Centanni joins us to give you the real story. He draws here from his own geography and mapmaking expertise, plus a careful reading of the whole UN resolution, and a close viewing of the whole debate and vote. So keep reading for the six main things you should know about what happened at the UN, with plain English explanations of:

The important difference between a map and a map projection
The myth that the UN chose a new official map
The wrong assumption that the UN undervalued Mercator maps or only likes Equal Earth
The misconception that the UN was using a Mercator world map before this
The misunderstanding that equal-area maps are something new
What professional mapmakers think about the Mercator and Equal Earth projections

(This article focuses on misinformation about what the UN did, while a companion article covers the politics of the debate and vote, including objections by the US, Ukraine, and other countries.)

1. Projecting: The issue is how to make maps, not which individual map to use

It’s important to understand that the resolution passed by the UN wasn’t actually about any individual maps, but about map projections, or different ways of smashing and stretching the globe onto a flat map. “Map” might sometimes be a reasonable shorthand for “map projection”, but its use in the media has led to some confusion lately, even on the floor of the UN itself.

Small thumbnail image of a detailed political map of the world, showing the countries in different colors, with curved left and right edges of the map, and continents appearing to be somewhat elongated north-to-south, except in the far north, where they appear to be squished up against the top edge of the map.

The Equal Earth Wall Map series is made by one of the inventors of the Equal Earth projection. The UN's recent resolution recommended the projection, not the maps. (Free-use graphic from equal-earth.com)

The shapes, sizes, and orientation of the continents on a world map are determined by which map projection is used by the mapmaker (also called a “cartographer”), and what settings are applied in the projection process. But any number of maps can still be made from the same projection settings, using different borders, colors, symbols, labels, etc.

There’s one big, understandable reason for the recent confusion over this: There’s both a map projection method and a series of individual maps called “Equal Earth” (the map series is made by one of the projection’s inventors, using that projection method). Some people promoting the Equal Earth projection have definitely added to this confusion, calling both the projection and the map series just “the map”.

Mercator vs. Equal Earth Projections

Simple map of the world in the Mercator projection with Tissot's indicatrices in the form of red circles, all nearly perfectly round, and all similarly sized in the tropics and subtropics, but much larger at higher latitudes.

Simple map of the world in the Equal Earth projection with Tissot's indicatrices in the form of red ovals, all visibly about the same size, but elongated north-to-south at low latitudes and elongated east-to-west at high latitudes.

Demonstrations of the Mercator (top) and Equal Earth (bottom) map projections, showing how equally-sized circles on a globe are distorted differently by each projection. These projections are just two options out of many, but have been misleadingly discussed lately as an either-or choice.

(Map graphics by Justin Kunimune at Wikimedia Commons. The Equal Earth map is in the public domain, and the Mercator map is licensed under CC BY-SA).

The recent discussion has mostly covered just two different map projection methods: the Mercator projection and the Equal Earth projection. That laser focus is a little misleading, since there are actually many possible projections to choose from when making a world map – but I’ll get to that in a minute. For now, here’s what you need to know:

The Mercator is an older style of laying out world maps, designed to be useful to ship navigators, with the side effect of hugely magnifying some parts of the world. And the Equal Earth projection is one of many ways to completely eliminate that problem, making the comparative sizes of every country and continent on the map exactly the same as in real life (mapmaking methods that do this are called “equal-area projections”).

Because it's impossible to perfectly smash the whole surface of a globe onto a flat surface, the Equal Earth method comes with tradeoffs: Besides making the map almost useless for navigation, it actually distorts the shape of countries and continents much more than the Mercator does.

The Equal Earth projection is especially loved by the “#CorrectTheMap” campaign, run by activists from Africa, whose work played a big role in leading to this month’s UN vote. #CorrectTheMap feels strongly that Mercator world maps should be replaced by Equal Earth maps, arguing that the Mercator projection is unfair to Africa and tropical countries. The reason: Most of the countries whose sizes are most exaggerated by the Mercator projection are powerful countries in Europe and North America, who have historically treated the rest of the world as inferior.

This argument about Mercator-fueled injustice has a history going back at least 50 years, and has been gradually accepted as common sense among many geographers. However, limited research studies in the 21st Century suggest that Mercator maps don’t actually change people’s perceptions of the world as much as we assumed. (And just about everyone agrees the Mercator projection’s inventor wasn’t trying to fool anyone – in fact, he had his own favorite equal-area projection for non-navigational maps.)

For more on the question of Mercator's real-world impacts, check out our companion article covering the UN debate, which includes a discussion of related complaints by the US.

Mercator Magnification: Africa “Bigger” and “Smaller”

More specifically, the countries most magnified by Mercator world maps include all those in northern Europe, as well as Russia, Canada, and the US state of Alaska. But the most iconic example is the island of Greenland (a self-governing territory linked to Denmark), which the Mercator projection shows about the same size as the African continent, even though you could actually fit 14 Greenlands into Africa.

Importantly, this only makes Africa “smaller” when you shrink the whole world to fit the exaggerated northern regions into the map (especially if you include most of Antarctica, which is magnified the most). If you cut maps from both projections to show just Africa, as the BBC and the Guardian did in their headline graphics, you can of course still make Africa look about the same size in each. This is a good way to confuse millions of people who saw posts of the news story but didn’t carefully read the articles.

Four crops of the same Mercator world map side-by-side, scaled to each be the same height. The first from the left is tall and skinny, with Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean ridiculously huge at bottom and top. The second is roughly square, cropped to exclude most of Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean, though what's left is still exaggeratedly large. The third is an elongated rectangle, cropped to exclude all of Antarctica, but still include all of the hugely-magnified Greenland in the north. The fourth is cropped to only include Africa. As the maps become increasingly zoomed in, the size of Africa in the graphic can be seen to grow from tiny to nearly filling up the whole frame.

The same Mercator world map cut four different ways: The visual size of Africa depends on how much of the world you exclude – but its seeming size in proportion to Europe stays the same. Mercator world maps usually cut off most of Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean because they're insanely exaggerated in size (in real life, Antarctica is smaller than South America, and Greenland is smaller than Australia). Graphic by PolGeoNow – contact us for permission to use it.

2. The UN didn’t “adopt” or “approve” any official map or map projection

Despite what many headlines from major news media said, the UN vote this month wasn’t about choosing an official map for the UN, or even deciding which map projection is best. UN delegates “adopted” a resolution (gave the statement their stamp of approval), but that resolution had nothing to say about an official map or projection. “Adopting” a map or projection itself sounds like it means they made it their official choice, and nothing quite like that happened.

As reporters and editors would know if they had actually read the text of the resolution, basically all it did was urge everyone to avoid most Mercator-projected maps, and to get serious about choosing the best projection for each map, while mentioning that it thinks the Equal Earth projection is often a good alternative.

In fact, the UN doesn’t have any single official map or projection. The main office of the UN says it has “no prescribed projections” at all, and this month’s resolution doesn’t seem to mandate any change to that. Many news reports noted that the resolution was “non-binding” – it can’t be enforced on anyone outside the UN – but missed the bigger point: It didn’t claim to do anything that would need enforcing in the first place.

Part of the confusion is probably related to the “#CorrectTheMap” campaign, which the UN resolution was inspired by, borrowed its name from, and gives a direct shout-out to. That campaign has called for the UN and others to stop using the Mercator projection, and instead “adopt” the Equal Earth projection “in their data, reports, and materials”. If you’ve been keeping track, that’s the third different meaning of the word “adopt” so far – this time for something more like “start actually using”.

Photo of a large, round, high-ceilinged room with many rows of mostly empty chairs, six of them to each elongated wooden desk, divided by four aisles in a gently-sloped amphitheater setup. A dull green carpet covers the entire floor, including a stage at the back of the room, topped by a high raised platform and three chairs that face back into the room. A large slice of the wall behind the stage is covered in coppery golden surface, with a large UN emblem in the middle, and the rest of the walls are mostly covered in dense, vertical wooden slats, with the windows of two wrap-around viewing galleries peeking through.

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly Hall in New York City, where this month's map vote took place. The Assembly didn't actually "adopt" any map, only discouraging the overuse of Mercator world maps and recommending Equal Earth maps as a favored alternative. Photo by PolGeoNow, from November 2019 (contact us for permission to use it.)

So it’s easy to imagine how, at first glance, journalists have gotten confused (though one hopes that good journalists aren’t relying only on first glances!). There’s also the fact that a resolution earlier this year by the African Union, a separate organization from the UN, did say it was officially “adopting” the Equal Earth projection. And there's no question that the UN resolution is a big victory for #CorrectTheMap, so you might have guessed that the campaign got exactly what it wanted.

In a way, maybe it has: The UN hasn’t labeled Equal Earth as its official projection (or map), but it does seem likely to start using a lot more Equal Earth maps in its reports now, “adopting” them in the last sense. But it hasn’t done that yet, and in fact didn’t even fully commit to it…

3. The UN didn’t even push Equal Earth that hard, or fully condemn Mercator

Before Mercator defenders get too mad: The UN's resolution made a point of clarifying that the Mercator projection is still fine for navigational purposes, only complaining that it’s “widely used in educational, media, digital and official materials” where other projections would be better. The government of Togo, the West African country that introduced the resolution, was even more firm about that. It was quoted saying its initiative “in no way challenges the use of the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains fully suited.”

Something you might find more surprising: The UN resolution only gently endorsed the Equal Earth projection, calling it “a relevant option”, saying it “encourages” people to use and promote it “where [continents’] sizes are critical”, and recommending it for classrooms “depending on the intended use”. Rather than aggressively pushing Equal Earth, the document was much more focused on generally avoiding maps that distort the relative sizes of continents and countries, and promoting more thoughtful and professional mapping practices.

4. The UN was already (mostly) not using the Mercator projection

Another misunderstanding spread by news media is that the UN voted to “replace” or “retire” its own use of the Mercator projection. The fact is that the UN already wasn’t using Mercator-based maps very much.

Before the resolution, the organization’s main office listed several map projections it used a lot, none of which was Mercator, with the exception of a specialized, non-controversial case: The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM), a system dividing the world into small sideways Mercator maps, which is an industry standard for close-up mapping and surveying, where size distortion is minimal and Mercator’s correct angles are more important (it’s never used for a map of the whole world, except when you’re explaining how it works).

The UN mapping office’s own simple “Map of the World”, which barely anyone seems to actually use, has already used an equal-area projection since 2022 (it looks to me like Eckert IV, an older method with very similar results to Equal Earth). Before that, the map used what looks like the plate carrée, one of the simplest map projections, where the Earth’s latitude and longitude lines are just bent into a perfectly straight, evenly-spaced grid on the map. Because real longitude lines come together at the North and South Poles, pulling them apart still enlarges Greenland and Antarctica a lot – but not as much as in the Mercator projection, which for navigational purposes has to space the horizontal lines farther apart the closer they get to the north and south poles.

When the UN does use Mercator

When I searched the UN website for whole-world map images, I did turn up a minority of maps that looked to be using the Mercator projection. There were also some that looked to be using the plate carrée projection mentioned above, which distorts the sizes of countries less, but is an equally lazy choice. But the most common projection was probably the Robinson, which is designed to keep continents and countries closer to their real shape than in Equal Earth, in exchange for accepting a modest amount of magnification near the poles (see illustration below).

So why does the UN website even have Mercator maps, if its map office doesn’t normally use them? The first category I found were infographics and decorative maps apparently made by people in smaller offices and side-agencies of the UN – or even third parties – rather than the organization’s main cartographic staff. The second category were screenshots of downloadable mapping data, which can easily be converted into any projection, and interactive web maps, which for technical reasons prefer a variation of the Mercator projection (major ones like Google Maps, Apple Maps, and OpenStreetMap.org also use this, though most people aren't using them to look at the whole world).

Will any of this go away after the recent vote? Maybe. While the resolution didn’t ban any Mercator maps even at the UN, it did send a widely-heard message of disapproval, which could reach designers who were using them out of ignorance or laziness. The resolution also did task the office of the UN Secretary-General (the organization’s internal manager and figurehead leader) with monitoring what map projections are used in reports over the next three years – a move that might crank up the pressure on mapmakers who are still ignoring the recommendations.

5. Equal-area maps aren’t “new”, and the Equal Earth projection wasn’t just invented

In yet another case of misleading news headlines – and probably the most widespread – many outlets described the Equal Earth projection as a “new world map”. Besides the fact that the UN resolution was about a projection, not a map, the Equal Earth method has been around for eight years already, and very similar projections have existed for more than a century. A different style of equal-area projection was invented at least 450 years ago, and used by Mercator himself – the man who the other projection is named for.

So maybe they meant “new” as in “new to the UN”. But even that’s a stretch, since as I covered above, the UN hasn’t officially adopted the map. I haven't found any examples of UN materials using the Equal Earth projection before, but as mentioned earlier, they were already using a very similar one for their basic world map. In any case, any idea that an Equal Earth map was invented for this occasion is wrong. In fact, some of the publicity it's getting goes specifically against its creators' intentions...

6. Experts don’t see Equal Earth as a “one-size-fits-all” solution

It’s not too controversial among geographers and cartographers to say Mercator world maps are overused. For making general maps of the world, most serious mapmakers have favored other projections for many decades. And whether or not it really misleads people about the world, it's frustrating for us to see maps that aren't designed well for their purpose.

Two simple world maps superimposed on each other with one in red and the other in turquoise. The two maps are aligned such that there's no visible discrepancy around most of Europe, but the Arctic, the red version of Greenland, Alaska, and northern Canada noticeably overflow the bounds of the turquoise versions, while the turquoise versions of South America and Africa are significantly elongated in comparison with the red versions of them. Compared to the turquoise version, landmasses in the red version are also noticeably offset towards the center of the map in both the tropics and the southern hemisphere, while the two versions of Antarctica barely overlap each other, with the red version higher up on the map than the turquoise version.

A comparison of the Robinson projection (red) and Equal Earth projection (blue-green). Many mapmakers prefer Robinson over Equal Earth for simple world maps like this, because it preserves the real shapes of the continents much better, with much less size exaggeration for the polar regions than in Mercator maps. This image is a free-use graphic by Wikipedia contributor Flexagoon (source).

Sometimes mapmakers really will favor an equal-area projection like Equal Earth – but more often they choose a compromise between size distortions and shape distortions, like the above-mentioned Robinson projection, or the Winkel Tripel. In fact, the Equal Earth's inventors made clear that they meant it as a backup option for the Robinson projection, in specific scenarios where you need to keep sizes exactly proportional.

Earlier this year, as momentum was building for the #CorrectTheMap campaign (and just before the African Union did officially adopt the Equal Earth projection), the International Cartographic Association published a document disputing the idea that Equal Earth is the perfect antidote to Mercator distortions. The experts agreed that Equal Earth is “often a good choice” and Mercator is “generally a poor default choice” for common types of world maps, but stated firmly that Equal Earth and similar projections “are not one-size-fits-all solutions”, and can also be a bad choice sometimes.

This echoed the words of the Equal Earth projection’s own creators when they released it in 2018: “As professional cartographers, though, we know that equal-area projections are not the panacea that…organizations might think”.

They've been taking all this well though: One of the three inventors told a journalist the attention was a "valuable opportunity to strengthen map literacy" and to "raise awareness that there is no single map projection capable of providing a completely ‘true’ representation of the world". Another was even more positive: "The fact that the UN is debating map projections for an entire hour is already totally thrilling," he said. "What else can you ask for?"

It's not as clear that the third inventor is having a good time, but he's still responded gracefully. After details of his Equal Earth Wall Map series accidentally got his work labeled a threat to Ukraine at the world's highest forum, he was quoted saying he's "grateful for the many helpful suggestions".

A cartographer thanks you for reading!

If you got this far, you’re now officially one of the world’s most-informed people on the 2026 UN map vote! If you see others still getting things wrong, send them a link to this article to clear things up! You can also check out our companion article on the truth about challenges to the UN resolution by the US, Ukraine, and other countries (it's also not quite what you probably thought).

Feel free to tag us on social media with any questions you might have about either one! And if you can, please consider buying us a coffee. We spent more than 60 work hours making these two articles, which as always are written by humans (no AI slop). We have no reliable income from free articles like this, and the money PolGeoNow brings in is barely enough for us to get by.

Monday, September 21, 2026