UN adopts new world map correcting centuries-old Western distortion

What changed

In early September the UN General Assembly approved the "Correct the Map" campaign's proposal to move away from the 16th-century Mercator projection towards the more accurate "Equal Earth" map. The resolution, sponsored by Togo, was backed by 164 member states. The only country to vote against was the United States — according to the Guardian, the US representative to the UN, Yaryna Ferencevych, called such resolutions "barnacles on our work." The Guardian reports that six other countries abstained, including Japan and Ukraine.

The Mercator projection, long dominant on classroom walls and government websites, visually enlarges northern-hemisphere countries while shrinking others, notably Africa. The Equal Earth projection was created in 2018 by three cartographers: Tom Patterson, a US national parks cartographer, Bojan Šavrič, a California-based software engineer, and Bernhard Jenny, an associate professor at Monash University in Melbourne.

Reactions and disputes

According to DW, Togo's foreign minister, Robert Dussey, described the vote as a "feeling of pride," arguing that Africa's current depiction on maps does not match its historical, geographical or economic reality. The African Union also backs the campaign.

The Guardian notes that some objections stemmed from a misunderstanding: the projection actually voted on by the UN is a purely mathematical rendering of land and sea, without borders or political shading. The confusion arose from a separate website run by Patterson featuring annotated, geopolitically labelled maps. Japan requested revisions because the disputed Kuril Islands appeared in the same colour as Russia, while Ukraine objected that Russian-occupied Crimea was shaded differently from the rest of its territory — which Ukrainian officials called a violation of international law.

As the Guardian reports, Greenland also appears smaller on the new projection, a territory US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to acquire. DW notes that Trump has separately signed executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario as Lake America.

Broader context

DW places the map debate within a wider movement to decolonize knowledge that has been building since the late 2000s, spanning school curricula to museums. In October 2025 Mali removed French history from its school curriculum, shifting focus to Malian and other West African kingdoms; DW reports that Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania have taken similar steps. Africa No Filter, a non-profit that backed the mapping campaign, estimates that biased media coverage may cost Africa up to $4.2 billion a year in inflated interest payments.

The cartographers themselves acknowledge the new projection is not perfect either — New Zealand, for instance, appears stretched at the map's edge. "A map is never neutral," said Jenny, noting that any flat representation of a sphere requires trade-offs.