The UN votes 164-1 to push Equal Earth over Mercator in classrooms and offices

The UN General Assembly voted 164 to 1, with six abstentions, to encourage governments and institutions to use the Equal Earth projection instead of the Mercator map when relative size is the point. Togo sponsored the resolution on behalf of African Union members. The Bahamas co-sponsored. The United States voted no. Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine abstained.

Gerardus Mercator drew his projection in 1569 so that a compass course was a straight line. That property still makes it the right sheet for marine and air navigation. It also inflates land near the poles. Greenland can look as large as Africa. Africa is about 14 times larger. South America shrinks. Europe grows. The African Union adopted Equal Earth for its own maps in March. Togo asked the UN membership in April to do the same. Informal talks ran through July. The vote came on 4 September.

Robert Dussey, Togo's foreign minister, put the claim in a short sentence before the vote: maps shape how people understand the world. The resolution calls the shift an act of "cognitive justice and memorial reparation". It does not ban Mercator. The Togolese foreign ministry said the text "in no way challenges the use of the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains fully suited". Equal Earth, published in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, keeps relative area honest and accepts the usual equal-area trade: shapes stretch toward the edges.

Washington called the resolution an ideological distraction from peace and prosperity. Ukraine abstained for a different reason. Kyiv said it supported a fairer picture of Africa but feared that some political maps associated with the Equal Earth project could blur the status of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The European Union voted yes and added a rider: support for the projection is not support for any particular political map on a website, and the vote does not change borders.

France said it would move diplomatic maps off Mercator. School ministries are the real target. Wall maps, textbooks and default web tiles still lean on Mercator because it is familiar and because north-up rectangles are easy to print. A UN resolution does not force a publisher to change a plate. It does give education ministries a citation when they issue a tender.

The information gain is not the vote count. It is the limit written into the text. Navigation keeps Mercator. Classrooms and political briefings are asked to switch. The U.S. no vote isolates Washington on a cartographic file it could have treated as harmless. Ukraine's abstention shows that even a technical projection picks up sovereignty fights. Equal Earth will not end those fights. It will make Africa look like Africa on the wall behind the speaker.