The UN Just Voted to "Correct the Map" — But It Was Never Using Mercator

On 4 September 2026, the UN voted 164 to 1 to officially adopt a new world map called Equal Earth. It shows every country and continent at its true size. Only the US voted against it.

It's easy to see why this made news. On the classic Mercator map — the one most people still picture when they think "world map" — Africa looks about the same size as Greenland. It isn't. Africa is roughly 14 times bigger. Equal Earth finally shows that.

It's a fair, overdue fix. But the more interesting question is why the UN went all the way with it, instead of choosing a gentler in-between map. Every flat map trades something off: you can keep countries' shapes looking right, or their sizes, but not fully both. The UN chose size, no compromise — and there's more to why than most coverage has said.

Why so dramatic?

This wasn't treated as a technical fix. UN reporting called it an act of "cognitive justice and memorial reparation," correcting how Africa has been visually undersold for centuries. Togo's foreign minister, Robert Dussey, who led the push for the African Union, said: "A fair map does not change the geography of the world, it changes how we see the world." France agreed, and said it would stop using Mercator too.

The US disagreed strongly, calling it a distraction from "genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations." Both sides, in their own way, agree on one thing: this was always a statement, not just a map update — and it followed another UN resolution earlier this year calling the transatlantic slave trade "the gravest crime against humanity." A quieter, more balanced map wouldn't have made the same point.

The twist: the UN wasn't using Mercator

Here's what most coverage missed: check the UN's own map guidelines and Mercator barely appears. For decades, the UN's own maps have used Robinson and Winkel Tripel — projections designed to balance shape and size, rather than favour one completely.

So this resolution wasn't the UN fixing its own habits. It was aimed at Mercator's afterlife everywhere else: old habits, stock images, and the generic wall map — not any official body still using it on purpose.

One quick correction: Mercator keeps angles and directions accurate, not distances. That's exactly why it distorts size — the scale grows the further you get from the equator. Useful for sailors and street maps; a real problem at world-map scale.

Google Maps shows both sides of this. It still uses a Mercator-style map for city and street views, because that's genuinely useful for navigation. But since 2018, it switches to an actual 3D globe once you zoom out to see the whole planet — specifically because Mercator makes Africa look smaller than Greenland at that scale. Even Google agrees the flat map falls down at world view.

We've done this before

This argument isn't new. In 1973, a historian named Arno Peters made almost the same case with a map now called Gall-Peters. Cartographers criticised it heavily — not because the point about Mercator was wrong, but because Peters overstated his own map's accuracy. Equal Earth, designed in 2018, fixes that: the same commitment to true size, but with continent shapes people actually find pleasant to look at.

In fact, Gall-Peters is the more extreme-looking map of the two. What's dramatic about the UN's choice isn't picking the ugliest option — it's choosing full size-accuracy over any compromise at all. Equal Earth just does that more elegantly than Gall-Peters ever did.

Masterstroke, or misguided?

Both views are fair. As a statement, this worked about as well as a symbolic UN vote can: France changed its own policy within days, and searches for "equal area projection" spiked. A gentler, Robinson-style map would never have grabbed the same attention.

But a UN vote doesn't automatically change habits. Gall-Peters made the same case in the 1970s, and fifty years on, most "normal" world maps — Mercator or not — still make Africa look a little smaller than it really is. There's also a fair question about whether a map, however accurate, is the right response to real development challenges, rather than a symbolic and easier win.

Here's part of why the old picture has stuck around: to most people, world maps come in two types — "normal," and "the unusual one that fixes Africa's size." Robinson and Winkel Tripel look close enough to "normal" that people often assume they're looking at Mercator, even when they're not. A subtler fix simply wouldn't get noticed. Going all the way to an equal-area map may have been the only change most people could actually see.

In Mercator's defence

One person deserves better out of all this: Gerardus Mercator himself. His 1569 map solved a specific problem — helping sailors navigate by compass — and did it brilliantly. He never claimed it was a fair picture of country sizes; that was never the goal. The real issue is five centuries of people using a navigation tool as a general map of the world, without ever mentioning the trade-off. That's the habit worth correcting — not Mercator's original, genuinely clever design.

Is everyone about to switch to Equal Earth maps? Maybe, eventually — we're watching with interest, and we don't have one in the range just yet. But if this story has you thinking about the shape-versus-size trade-off for the first time, our Future Maps line work on exactly the same principle, and we've a few different takes on it worth a look — alongside the Robinson and Winkel Tripel maps the UN's own cartographers still reach for.