Overview
- The General Assembly approved the recommendation on Friday, September 11, 2026, with 164 countries voting in favor and the United States the only recorded dissenting vote.
- The resolution, driven by Togo and backed by the African Union, asks countries and institutions to move away from the Mercator projection and promote proportional projections that preserve relative area.
- Cartographers say Mercator, created in 1569 for navigation, enlarges regions far from the equator so that Greenland and parts of Europe appear much larger than they are in relation to Africa.
- Adopting proportional projections produces visible shifts on maps: Peru appears narrower and more elongated, Brazil and Africa gain a truer visual scale, and Oceania looks less diminished compared with Mercator views.
- The vote is recommendatory rather than binding, so real change will depend on national education systems, media outlets and digital map providers updating curricula, graphics and platforms, and it has been framed by commentators as a move about political representation as well as cartographic accuracy.