UN assembly backs Equal Earth map; United States casts the only no vote

The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday, 4 September, to encourage governments and institutions to drop the 1569 Mercator world map in classrooms, newsrooms and official use, and to adopt the Equal Earth projection instead. The score was 164 in favour, one against, and six abstentions. The sole no vote was the United States.

Togo sponsored the text on behalf of the African Union. Foreign Minister Robert Dussey put the case in a single line: "A fair world begins with a fair map." Mercator stretches land near the poles and shrinks land near the equator. On that grid Greenland looks roughly as large as Africa. Africa is about 14 times larger, at some 30.3 million square kilometres. The resolution calls that distortion a "symbolic minimization" with effects on education, culture and politics.

Equal Earth is an equal-area projection presented in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. It keeps relative surface area and tries to hold continental shapes closer to a globe than older equal-area grids such as Gall-Peters. On Equal Earth, Europe contracts, Brazil expands, Greenland shrinks, and Africa occupies the share of the page that its landmass warrants.

The resolution is not a ban. Togo's foreign ministry said it "in no way challenges the use of the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains fully suited." Mercator still maps constant compass bearings as straight lines, which is why sailors and pilots keep it. The UN text aims at walls, textbooks, news graphics and digital defaults, not at charts on a bridge.

France announced the same day that it would abandon Mercator in official representations. The African Union had already adopted Equal Earth in March. Togo asked UN members in April to follow. Informal consultations ran in July. Africa No Filter, one of the campaign groups, said after the vote that it wants the new grid "in schools, textbooks, newsrooms, businesses and on the digital platforms billions of people use every day."

The six abstentions were Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine. Ukraine's UN envoy Andriy Melnyk said Kyiv could not support the text because Equal Earth maps show parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia "in a manner that is wholly unacceptable." He tied that objection to earlier General Assembly resolutions on Crimea and territorial integrity. The cartographic fight, in that reading, is also a fight about which borders a world map is allowed to freeze.

Washington called the resolution an "ideological agenda" and a distraction from peace, prosperity and relations among states. That argument treats the vote as theatre. The sponsors treat it as a change in the default picture children see. Both can be true at once. A non-binding text does not rewrite a navy chart. It does tell ministries of education and map platforms what 164 governments now say is the preferred classroom image.

India voted yes. So did most of Africa, Latin America and Asia. The practical work starts after the gavel. Curriculum offices have to reprint. Web map libraries have to offer Equal Earth as a default or as a one-click layer. News desks have to decide whether a story about Africa still opens on a Mercator inset that makes the continent look like a smaller neighbour of Europe.

Gerardus Mercator drew his grid to help ships. It did that job. It also trained several centuries of readers to misread size. The assembly has now said, by a wide margin, that size should be taught first and navigation kept where it belongs. Whether that sentence reaches a school atlas in 2027 is a procurement question, not a diplomatic one.