On the 4th of September 2026, in a General Assembly hall in New York, 164 countries voted to change the shape of the world you grew up believing in. Only one country voted no. And the argument wasn't really about geography at all.
The resolution, put forward by Togo on behalf of the African Union, encourages the world to move away from the Mercator projection – the rectangular map that's hung in classrooms and been printed in atlases for generations – in favour of a newer alternative called Equal Earth. It's non-binding, so nobody's confiscating classroom wall maps or grounding aircraft that still navigate by Mercator's grid. But it's the culmination of a fight that's been running, in one form or another, for well over fifty years, and the maths at the centre of it is more interesting than you'd expect.
A map built for sailors, not students
Gerardus Mercator wasn't trying to make Africa look smaller when he published his map in 1569. He was a Flemish cartographer trying to solve a genuinely difficult problem: how do you flatten a sphere onto a sheet of paper without ruining the one thing sailors actually needed from it – a reliable compass bearing? He was upfront about exactly that purpose at the time – the map's full title translates roughly to New and Augmented Description of Earth Corrected for the Use of Sailors, which is about as clear a statement of intent as a 16th-century cartographer could give you.
Image: Wikipedia
On a globe, the shortest route between two points curves. On Mercator's map, if you drew a straight line between your ship's position and your destination and held that exact compass heading the entire way, you'd get there – a route cartographers call a rhumb line, or loxodrome, if you want to sound properly nautical about it. Before satellite navigation, that property was worth more to a ship's captain than almost anything else a map could offer. Mercator's projection made ocean navigation dramatically more reliable, and for that specific job, it's never really been beaten.
The trade-off is baked into the mathematics. The only line on Mercator's map drawn to true scale is the equator itself. Move away from it in either direction and the map starts inflating everything, and the further from the equator you go, the worse the inflation gets. Because Africa straddles the equator, it comes out relatively close to its real proportions. Everywhere further north – Europe, North America, Russia – gets progressively blown up. Greenland, sitting up near the Arctic Circle, ends up looking roughly comparable in size to the entire African continent on Mercator's map. In reality, Africa covers something like 30.37 million square kilometres (around 11.7 million square miles) against Greenland's 2.17 million (about 836,000 square miles) – so Africa is roughly 14 times bigger. It's not that Africa was shrunk. It's that everything sitting further from the equator was stretched.
The Mercator Projection Map (Image: Wikipedia)
Fifty years of arguing about a map
The idea that this was a problem worth solving isn't new. In 1973, the German historian Arno Peters presented an equal-area alternative that preserved every landmass's true relative size – a projection that, awkwardly for Peters, had actually been devised more than a century earlier by the English clergyman James Gall, which is why cartographers today generally call it the Gall-Peters projection. Peters framed his map explicitly as a corrective to what he saw as a Eurocentric distortion baked into how the world had been taught to see itself, and through the 1980s a number of aid organisations and even UNESCO adopted it for exactly that reason. It never fully won over the cartographic establishment, though, and the criticism wasn't unfair. In fixing the size problem, Gall-Peters badly stretched and squashed the shapes of continents, leaving Africa looking unusually tall and thin. Getting area right and getting shape right turned out to be very hard to do at the same time.
It took until 2018 for three cartographers – Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny, and Tom Patterson – to publish the Equal Earth projection, designed specifically to preserve true relative area while keeping continental shapes looking recognisably close to correct. That's the map the 2026 resolution is built around. And it's worth noting that this isn't purely an academic fight either; Google Maps quietly made a version of this same call back in 2018, switching its zoomed-out desktop world view from flat Mercator to a 3D globe specifically to stop Greenland looking the size of Africa. Web Mercator hasn't disappeared entirely, it still runs the street-level grid tiles behind most digital maps, where preserving angles truly matters for navigation, but the default zoomed-out view most people actually see has already been quietly moving away from it for years.
Equal Earth Projection Map (Image: Wikipedia)
What actually happened at the UN
The African Union formally adopted Equal Earth as its preferred map in March 2026, and Togo carried that momentum to the General Assembly on behalf of the African Group. The resolution's own text calls the shift an act of "cognitive justice and memorial reparation" – basically arguing that centuries of visually shrinking the Global South on the world's default map has shaped how billions of people instinctively rank global size, power, and importance.
The United States cast the sole vote against, with its representative describing the effort as part of a broader "ideological project" it wanted no part of. Six countries abstained – Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine – and Ukraine's abstention is worth pausing on, because it's a reminder that even an "equal-area" map can't sidestep politics entirely. Kyiv's objection wasn't to the underlying mathematics; it was that available Equal Earth map data depicted Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russia in a way its delegation considered unacceptable. Even a map built to correct one form of political distortion, in other words, still has to make choices that can read as political to some.
What fascinates me about this story
What I find really interesting about this story isn't the trigonometry, though the trigonometry is a nice hook. It's that a tool built to solve a 16th-century navigation problem ended up, almost by accident, quietly training billions of people's perceptions about size and importance – and that it took over fifty years of sustained argument, three failed and partial fixes, and a specific act of the UN General Assembly to even put a dent in that instinct.
You could argue that every map is a set of decisions about what to sacrifice – shape, area, distance, direction – because you can’t preserve all four when you flatten a sphere. Mercator made an honest, useful trade for the problem he was solving. The trouble was never his choice. It was that his map outlived its original job by four and a half centuries, ending up on classroom walls it was never designed for, silently teaching generations of schoolchildren a version of the world's proportions that was never true. I don't think there's a perfectly neutral map out there waiting to be discovered, but there's clearly a difference between a distortion you understand and choose for a purpose, and one that's just been sitting there unquestioned since the 1500s.
Enjoyed this story? Subscribe to the Hoodie History newsletter at hoodiehistory.com and get more stories like this in your inbox – plus a free copy of 10 History Stories You Won't Forget when you sign up.