Overview
- The General Assembly adopted Togo’s resolution on Friday with 164 votes in favor, six abstentions and a sole vote against from the United States, making a global recommendation rather than a legal rule.
- The text asks governments, schools, international organizations and mapping companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other area‑preserving projections when accurate relative size matters and does not ban the Mercator projection.
- Cartographers say the Mercator projection, created for 16th‑century navigation, enlarges high‑latitude regions and shrinks equatorial ones so that Greenland appears similar in size to Africa even though Africa is about 14 times larger.
- Practical change will be voluntary and slow because updating textbooks, national datasets and digital map tiles requires action by education authorities, statistical offices and tech platforms that currently rely on Web Mercator for technical reasons.
- Backed by the African Union and activists who call the move a correction of ‘cartographic colonialism,’ the vote could shift how the world teaches geography and perceives continental size and influence while critics, including the US, frame the push as ideological.