By Victoria Wilson |
The General Assembly hall, where the “Correct the Map” resolution was adopted 164 votes to one on 4 September 2026. Photo: Basil D Soufi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Four hundred and fifty-seven years after Gerardus Mercator drew a map to guide the ships of European maritime empire across open water, the United Nations General Assembly has voted to retire it as the world’s default image of itself. On 4 September 2026, 164 member states adopted resolution A/80/L.104, the “Correct the Map” resolution, encouraging governments, schools, and technology platforms to replace the sixteenth-century Mercator projection with the Equal Earth projection, a 2018 alternative that preserves continents’ true relative size. On the Mercator map, Greenland appears roughly the size of Africa. In reality, Africa is nearly fourteen times larger, large enough to hold the United States, China, India, and most of Europe within its 30.3 million square kilometres.
The vote did not begin at the United Nations. It began in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2025, when the advocacy organisations Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa launched the Correct the Map campaign, inviting schools, media houses, and institutions to pledge accurate representation of the continent’s size. Four months later, on 14 August 2025, the African Union, all fifty-five member states, endorsed the campaign, its largest institutional backer to date. It was this campaign, and not a UN body acting on its own initiative, that produced the resolution Togo carried to adoption just over a year later on behalf of the African Group.
“Correcting the map means recognizing that every region of the world deserves to be represented accurately and with dignity,” Togo’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and African Integration, Robert Dussey, told the General Assembly ahead of the vote. “A fair map does not change the geography of the world; it changes how we see the world.” Africa No Filter, marking the resolution’s passage, said the campaign’s aim was straightforward: “We want to see accurate maps in schools, textbooks, newsrooms, businesses and digital platforms.”
Moky Makura, of Africa No Filter, framed the vote’s significance beyond the map itself. “If we got something as basic as Africa’s size wrong for this long, what else about Africa have we simply accepted without questioning?” Speak Up Africa co-founder Fara Ndiaye, whose organisation launched the campaign alongside Africa No Filter in Dakar, made the same point from a different angle: “Correcting the map is not only an African issue. It is a matter of truth and accuracy that concerns the entire world.”
The Mercator projection was never designed to depict continents accurately. Mercator drew it in 1569 to preserve angles and bearings for sailors crossing open ocean, a tool suited to navigation and poorly suited to almost anything else. It inflates land near the poles and compresses land near the equator, a distortion that swells Europe and North America while shrinking Africa and South America on the same page. Mark Monmonier, a professor of geography at Syracuse University with no stake in the vote’s outcome, put the projection’s contemporary relevance plainly: “Outside of that very narrow navigation application, there is no point in using it.”
That a navigational tool from the age of European maritime expansion became, and remained, the default visual reference for how the world’s continents relate to one another for four and a half centuries is itself the story the vote addresses. The distortion was not corrected as cartographic techniques advanced past Mercator’s original purpose. It persisted through the era of colonial partition, through decolonisation, and into the digital age, resurfacing each time a new platform, from printed atlases to Google Maps, adopted it by default rather than by evaluation. A convention built for one narrow purpose in the sixteenth century continued to shape classroom instruction and editorial cartography into the twenty-first, long after the empire it served for navigation had formally ended. Press coverage of the resolution has characterised its language as tying the correction to the “symbolic minimization” of Africa and describing the act of correction itself as a matter of “cognitive justice and memorial reparation,” framing that places the vote closer to the continent’s long-running arguments over historical redress than to a routine standards update.
Much of the coverage that followed the vote organised itself around the dissent rather than the eighteen months of organising that produced the resolution, treating the United States’ single “no” vote as the story’s centre of gravity. A civil-society campaign, an unopposed continental endorsement, and a 164-country majority did not depend on American support to pass.
Only the United States voted against the resolution. Six countries, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine, abstained, with Ukraine’s delegate citing concern that the Equal Earth projection “depicts parts of Ukraine’s territory that have been temporarily occupied,” a technical objection distinct from the resolution’s subject. The United States delegation offered no such technical objection. Yaryna Ferencevych, Deputy U.S. Representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, told the Assembly the resolution was part of “a much larger and more radical ideological project,” and that “resolutions like this one and the ideological agenda they promote are barnacles” on the institution’s work. She did not dispute that Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland. No delegation did. What the United States objected to, by its own delegate’s account, was the resolution’s association with “reparations” and “cognitive justice,” language it treated as illegitimate grounds for a body it argued should occupy itself instead with “genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations.”
The record complicates that objection further. Five weeks before the vote, according to a Daily Maverick op-ed on the resolution, the State Department displayed a map at a health conference in Rio de Janeiro that misplaced three of the countries it named: Nigeria shown landlocked in the Sahara, Mozambique relocated to the Horn of Africa, Côte d’Ivoire moved to the opposite coast. The department traced the image to an AI tool and said it took full responsibility. The episode proves no conspiracy. It does show that the government objecting most forcefully to a resolution about accurate African representation had, weeks earlier, been unable to place Nigeria on the correct side of the continent it was naming.
A government that disputed the geography would be contesting a measurable fact. A government that accepts the geography and objects instead to the vocabulary of redress attached to it is contesting something else: whether the correction of a colonial-era distortion, once acknowledged as fact, obliges any acknowledgment beyond the correction itself.
Released to the public domain by its creator, cartographer Tom Patterson, the Equal Earth projection was developed in 2018 specifically to correct the size distortions of the Mercator map. Map: Tom Patterson (public domain)
France, which co-sponsored the resolution, converted the vote into a same-day national commitment, announcing it would abandon the Mercator projection outright. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the older map gave “the United States, Russia and China” a “disproportionate visual prominence compared to Africa,” where “Greenland appears almost as big as Africa.” But France’s announcement followed an African institutional precedent rather than setting one. The African Union had already adopted the Equal Earth projection as its own continental policy at an AU summit in February 2026, seven months before the UN vote, locating that decision explicitly within a framework of cognitive justice and reparations. The resolution itself remains non-binding; it does not compel any ministry of education or technology company to change a single map. What the continental-level adoption does not yet show is how many individual African education ministries, state broadcasters, and national cartographic agencies have translated it into their own classrooms and newsrooms.
At every stage, the initiative moved from African civil society outward, not from an international institution downward. The Bahamas’ decision to co-sponsor the resolution alongside the African Group extended that organising beyond the continent itself, a Caribbean state joining an African-led correction of a shared colonial-era distortion.
Togo’s government has said it will convene an implementation summit in Lomé during the first quarter of 2027, bringing together UNESCO, the African Union, and technology companies including Google Maps, to work out how the resolution’s encouragement becomes a change in the maps people actually see. Whether the 164-country majority becomes a working default, in classrooms and on the platforms billions of people open every day, is what that meeting, not the General Assembly’s tally, will now decide.
