‘Europe shrinks, Africa grows’: UN vote that could change the map of the world as you know it | Today’s news
The way the world has been shown for centuries could soon change after the UN backed an African-led push for maps that reflect the continents’ true relative sizes.
The true size of Africa is central to the UN vote on world maps
Africa will look much bigger. Europe and North America will no longer dominate the page in the same way. Greenland, perhaps the biggest victim of a cartographic illusion, is finally taking a closer look at what it really is: a vast island, but nowhere near the size of an actual continent.
The change follows a United Nations General Assembly resolution encouraging greater use of map projections that more accurately represent the relative sizes of countries and continents. The African-led initiative, championed by Togo and supported by the African Union, was adopted with 164 countries voting in favour.
India supported the resolution. The United States was the only country to vote against, while six countries abstained.
At the heart of the debate is a seemingly simple issue: The Earth is round, but the maps most people look at are flat.
Transforming the surface of a sphere into a rectangle is mathematically impossible without distorting something. A mapmaker can preserve the shape of landmasses, their relative area, distances, or directions—not all of these properties at once. So any flat world map is a compromise
The Mercator projection, created by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, made one particular compromise. It was designed primarily for navigation and allowed sailors to draw straight compass courses. This made him extremely useful. However, it was never intended to provide a true comparison of the size of the continents.
The distortion is increasingly dramatic away from the equator. On a Mercator map, Greenland can appear almost comparable in size to Africa. In fact, Africa is about 14 times larger. The projection similarly magnifies the northern regions, visually expanding parts of Europe and North America, while the equatorial landmasses appear relatively smaller than they actually are.
Therefore, the debate has moved far beyond geography. Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, told the General Assembly that the persistence of such distortions contributed to the “symbolic minimization” of Africa and the creation of an unbalanced understanding of global geography.
The African Union planned the campaign as an effort to have a fairer and more accurate representation of the continent and other regions
The resolution supports alternatives such as the Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018. It is an equal-area map, meaning the relative sizes of landmasses are much closer to reality, although some shapes still have to be deformed to flatten the globe. That is why Africa looks huge on such a map because it is geographically huge.
However, Washington rejected the resolution, arguing that it was linked to a broader ideological agenda, and criticized references to concepts including cognitive justice and reparations. Ukraine was among six countries that abstained, citing concerns about how some Equal Earth maps depict Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.
The UN resolution is not legally binding and Mercator maps are unlikely to disappear from navigation. But the vote could affect the maps used in education, institutions and technology.
The planet itself has not changed. His continents did not move.
It only has a picture of them. And for the millions of people who have spent their lives learning geography from a warped rectangle, this can turn out to be a surprisingly consequential difference.
