UN Votes to Retire Mercator Map to Correct Africa's Geographic Scale

The United Nations General Assembly is set to vote on a resolution sponsored by Togo and backed by the 55-member African Union to formally phase out the traditional Mercator map projection in official global institutions. The diplomatic push aims to replace the 450-year-old cartographic standard with an equal-area map projection that accurately reflects Africa's true landmass—a continent fourteen times larger than Greenland yet historically rendered as its equal on classroom walls and navigational charts worldwide.

The 1569 Illusion: How Navigation Distorted Global Geography

For nearly five centuries, the standard view of Earth has relied on Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 projection. Mercator designed his map for wooden sailing ships traversing the Atlantic. By preserving straight lines of constant compass bearing, known as rhumb lines, the Mercator projection enabled sailors to navigate oceans without constantly recalculating their headings. However, translating a three-dimensional sphere onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper required a mathematical trade-off.

To preserve correct angles and shapes, the Mercator formula stretches the grid of latitude dramatically as it approaches the North and South Poles. Equatorial regions remain near their true proportional scale, while landmasses at higher latitudes inflate monstrously. Greenland, which covers roughly 2.16 million square kilometers, appears identical in size to Africa, which spans 30.37 million square kilometers. North America and Europe dominate the upper hemisphere visually, projecting an illusion of geographic vastness that distorts spatial literacy across generations.

Togo’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Robert Dussey, led the diplomatic campaign at the UN Headquarters, assembling unanimous backing from the African Union’s 54 other sovereign members. The resolution demands that UN agencies, educational materials, and public mapping standards transition toward equal-area projections that preserve actual relative land sizes.

The Spatial Reality: Africa’s True Physical Magnitude

The visual compression of the Global South has had long-standing consequences for policy, trade perceptions, and education. When continents are scaled correctly using equal-area projections such as the Gall-Peters or the modern Equal Earth projection, the physical dominance of the equatorial regions becomes striking.

• Africa (30.37 million sq km): Easily accommodates the combined landmasses of the contiguous United States, China, India, Western Europe, Japan, and Brazil with room to spare.
• South America (17.84 million sq km): Appears nearly double the size of Europe (10.18 million sq km), reversing the visual dominance created by Mercator.
• South Asia (4.48 million sq km): Displays its vast physical footprint relative to northern European states that routinely appear twice their actual size on traditional wall maps.

Cartographic distortion is not merely an academic technicality. Map choices influence spatial awareness, resource management decisions, and diplomatic positioning. By standardizing a map projection that shrank equatorial nations while expanding northern industrial powers, global institutions unintentionally reinforced colonial-era hierarchies in geopolitical imagination.

Implementation: Phasing Out Mercator in Diplomacy and Education

Replacing the world’s default map requires coordinate shifts across international bodies, digital platforms, and textbook publishers. The UN resolution calls for a systematic phase-out, encouraging member states to adopt equal-area maps in primary and secondary school curricula, government publications, and multilateral forums.

Digital mapping platforms have already taken preliminary steps toward solving this distortion. Web mapping services like Google Maps implemented a 3D globe view for desktop applications in 2018, eliminating Mercator’s polar distortion when zoomed out. However, static 2D maps used in printed education, international treaties, and news broadcasting remain overwhelmingly tied to legacy Mercator layouts.

The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny, has emerged as a prime candidate for the UN standard. It maintains visually pleasing land shapes while ensuring that every continent retains its exact relative surface area. As the General Assembly voting proceeds, international agencies face the practical task of updating decades of visual infrastructure to reflect the true dimensions of the planet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the UN voting to replace the Mercator world map projection?

The UN is voting to phase out the Mercator map because it severely distorts geographic scale by inflating polar landmasses like Greenland while shrinking equatorial continents like Africa. The resolution seeks to adopt an equal-area map projection that accurately depicts Africa's true landmass, which is fourteen times larger than Greenland.

Who spearheaded this resolution at the United Nations General Assembly?

Togo's Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Dussey introduced the diplomatic resolution at the UN General Assembly. The measure gained unanimous endorsement from all 55 sovereign member states of the African Union.

How does the traditional Mercator map distort geographical proportions?

Created in 1569 for ocean navigation, the Mercator projection preserves compass bearings by stretching latitude lines as they move away from the equator. As a result, Northern Hemisphere regions like Europe and North America appear visually dominant, while equatorial regions in South America, Africa, and South Asia are significantly understated.