The United Nations General Assembly has backed an Africa-led campaign for more accurate representations of the world’s continents, giving fresh international momentum to efforts to move beyond the widely used Mercator projection.
The resolution, “Correct the Map,” was adopted on Friday, September 4, 2026, with 164 countries voting in favour, one against and six abstaining. The United States was the only country to oppose it, while Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Moldova, Lithuania and Serbia abstained.
Togo led the initiative with African Union support, advocating greater use of equal-area projections such as Equal Earth, particularly in education and public communication.
The resolution does not ban Mercator or impose a single replacement. It instead encourages the use of projections that better preserve the relative size of landmasses where geographical accuracy is important. Mercator remains useful for navigation because it preserves direction.
Created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, the projection was designed primarily for maritime navigation. However, it increasingly enlarges landmasses farther from the Equator, producing a striking difference between their visual and actual sizes.
The distortion is especially evident in Africa’s comparison with Greenland. Although they can appear similar on a Mercator map, Africa covers about 30 million square kilometres, roughly 14 times Greenland’s area.
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Supporters of the campaign say repeated exposure to distorted maps can shape perceptions of Africa’s geographical scale and global significance.
The campaign, launched by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, gained formal African Union backing in August 2025 before Togo took the issue to the UN.
The debate has a longer history. In the 1970s, the Gall-Peters projection triggered controversy over how continents should be represented, after German historian Arno Peters promoted it as an alternative that preserved proportional land areas.
The current campaign favours Equal Earth, developed in 2018 by Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny and Bojan Šavrič. Like other equal-area projections, it prioritises accurate representation of landmass rather than navigation.
The UN vote marks a major step for the campaign, though its impact will depend on whether governments, schools, publishers and technology companies adopt alternative projections.
For its proponents, the goal is simple: maps used to educate and inform should reflect the world’s geography as faithfully as possible.