![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/0024f51e-614.jpg\"\/)
\nThe commonly used Mercator projection makes North America, Greenland, and Northern Europe\/Russia appear vastly larger than the reality<\/p>\n
The United Nations General Assembly voted for a resolution spearheaded by several African countries to adopt a map that makes their continent bigger while shrinking North America and Europe – aiming at “a more accurate representation” of world geography.<\/p>\n
The resolution was backed by 164 countries while the United States voted against it and six other states abstained.<\/p>\n
The new map – known as the Equal Earth cartographic projection – “offers a more accurate representation of the sizes of continental landmasses and to this end is a relevant option for improving the accuracy of the cartographic representation of the world,” the resolution says.<\/p>\n
It urges member states to adopt the new map in place of the traditional Mercator projection, which was designed for maritime navigation by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.<\/p>\n
\nThe commonly used Mercator projection makes North America, Greenland, and Northern Europe\/Russia appear vastly larger than the reality<\/p>\n
The foreign minister of Togo Robert Dussey, who drove the resolution, said maps “shape our understanding of the world”.<\/p>\n
“They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions,” Mr Dussey said at the UN.<\/p>\n
“They are therefore never neutral, when they present a distorted image of our planet, they risk perpetuating inaccurate representations that are passed down through generations.”<\/p>\n
‘Distorted representation’<\/p>\n
The Mercator projection focused on accurate depictions of the shapes and angles of land masses, but their relative sizes were often inaccurate – in part due to the challenge of rendering a three-dimensional globe onto a two-dimensional map.<\/p>\n
It inflated northern regions and compressed equatorial ones, making Europe and North America appear much larger, while shrinking Africa and South America.<\/p>\n
A group of cartographers launched the Equal Earth projection in 2018.<\/p>\n
It makes Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Oceania appear vastly larger.<\/p>\n
“Equal Earth preserves the relative surface areas of continents and, as much as possible, shows their shapes as they appear on a globe,” one of the cartographers, Bojan Savric, told AFP in 2025.<\/p>\n
The foreign ministry of France – which co-sponsored the resolution in support of the new map – announced that it would abandon the Mercator projection.<\/p>\n
In that map, “the United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual prominence compared to Africa, Latin America or southeast Asia,” while “Greenland appears almost as big as Africa,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said.<\/p>\n
“Changing maps obviously doesn’t change the world,” he acknowledged. “But correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth.”<\/p>\n
The initiative comes as France is seeking to improve relations with Africa, particularly in former colonies with which it has complicated ties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United Nations General Assembly voted for a resolution spearheaded by several African countries to adopt a map…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,7,8],"class_list":["post-672830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-eire","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117214694600088052","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}