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| The UN General Assembly Hall in New York City, where this month's map vote took place. Unlike the smaller UN Security Council, the General Assembly has little power to enforce decisions on countries, and instead exists more for building international consensus, setting goals, and overseeing projects. Photo by PolGeoNow, from November 2019 (contact us for permission to use it). |
UN Map Debate: The truth about the US and Ukrainian arguments, and what other countries said
As you might have heard, the United Nations (UN) held a vote early this month about maps, discouraging the use of the mapmaking method known as the Mercator projection, which produces world maps that hugely exaggerate the size of places far from the equator (like northern Europe, Siberia, Canada, and Antarctica). The idea is that this is unfair to countries like those in Africa, which look smaller than they really are compared to countries in more-powerful Europe. The Equal Earth projection was promoted as a good alternative, because it perfectly preserves relative sizes (while introducing other kinds of distortion).
Unfortunately, even major news media got key details wrong – for example, the UN didn’t officially “adopt” or “replace” any map or projection. For the truth about what it really did, check out our separate article on six things most people misunderstood about the UN decision. If you have opinions about map projections, you should definitely read that first! But if you're looking for the details on which countries said what, you're already in the right place...
