UN adopts new world map showing Africa’s true size after years of misrepresentation

• The UN General Assembly adopted the Correct the Map resolution by 164 votes to one, with six abstentions.

• The resolution promotes the Equal Earth projection, which represents the relative sizes of continents more accurately than Mercator.

• The push is mainly for more accurate representations in education and public communication.

The United Nations General Assembly has backed a new world map that gives a more accurate picture of the size of Africa and other continents, which was led by Togo and supported by the African Union.

The resolution, known as “Correct the Map”, was adopted on Friday, September 4, 202 and had 164 countries voting in favour, 1 voting against, the United States and 6 abstaining.

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The resolution promotes the use of the Equal Earth projection, a type of world map designed to show the relative sizes of countries and continents more accurately.

Despite the adoption, the UN has not legally banned the old map. The resolution is non-binding and encourages countries, international organisations and other institutions to consider more accurate map projections, particularly for education and public communication.

The issue goes back to the Mercator projection, the world map many people grew up seeing in classrooms, textbooks and online.

The Mercator projection was created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was designed mainly to help sailors navigate across the oceans, rather than to accurately compare the sizes of continents.

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The Earth is round, but a normal map is flat. When you try to flatten a round Earth onto a sheet of paper, some things have to become distorted. The Mercator projection keeps the shapes and directions useful for navigation, but it makes land areas closer to the North and South Poles appear much larger than they really are.

That is why Greenland can look almost as large as Africa on a Mercator map, even though Africa is actually about 14 times larger than Greenland.

Northern parts of the world, including Europe and North America, also appear larger relative to Africa than they really are.

The new map being promoted by the UN uses the Equal Earth projection and unlike the Mercator projection, Equal Earth is designed to preserve the relative size or area of land masses more accurately.

When you look at Africa, Europe, North America or South America on an Equal Earth map, their sizes are much closer to their actual proportions on the globe.

The projection was developed in 2018 by cartographers which sacrifices some accuracy in the shapes of countries to achieve a more accurate comparison of their areas.

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Togo led the African initiative behind the resolution after the African Union endorsed the “Correct the Map of Africa” campaign earlier this year. The AU said the initiative was intended to address longstanding distortions in the way Africa is represented on world maps.

Togo argued that maps do more than show geography. They can also influence how people understand the world.

Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said maps “guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.”

The campaign's supporters believe that when Africa is repeatedly shown smaller than it really is, it can contribute to a distorted understanding of the continent's geographical scale and importance.