UN General Assembly Endorses the Equal Earth Projection

🗞️ Why in News On 4 September 2026 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the “Correct the Map” resolution by 164 votes to 1, with 6 abstentions. It encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps in place of the Mercator projection where relative size matters. The United States cast the sole vote against. The resolution was led at the UN by Togo, backing a campaign run by Speak Up Africa and Africa No Filter in partnership with the African Union.

The Equal Earth projection. Every landmass is shown at its true relative area. Image: Strebe, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Impossibility at the Heart of Cartography

Every flat map of a spherical Earth distorts something, and it does so as a matter of mathematics rather than of skill or intent. A sphere has Gaussian curvature; a plane does not. No transformation between them can preserve all metric properties at once. A projection may preserve area, or shape and local angles, or distance from a point, or direction from a point, but never all of them together.

The cartographer’s choice is therefore never neutral. It is a decision about what to sacrifice, and that decision encodes a purpose.

Conformality and equivalence are mutually exclusive. A projection cannot preserve both shape and area, anywhere, at any scale. This is not a limitation of current technique; it is a theorem. Everything that follows in this controversy descends from it.

The tool that makes distortion visible. Tissot’s indicatrix is the standard device for showing where and how a projection distorts. Small circles of equal size are drawn on the globe and then projected. On a conformal map they remain circles but change size; on an equal-area map they keep their area but flatten into ellipses. Placed across a Mercator map, the indicatrix circles swell enormously towards the poles, which is the distortion made literal.

Why Mercator Won, and What It Cost

The Mercator projection was devised by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It is conformal, and it has one property no other projection of its era possessed: on a Mercator chart, a line of constant compass bearing, a rhumb line or loxodrome, is a straight line.

For a sixteenth-century navigator this was transformative. Set a ruler between two ports, read the angle, hold that bearing, and you arrive. The projection did not merely describe the ocean; it made ocean navigation computationally tractable. Mercator solved the problem it was built for, brilliantly.

The cost is structural. To keep shapes locally correct while the meridians are drawn as parallel vertical lines, the projection must stretch the map east to west by a factor of sec(latitude), and then stretch it north to south by the same factor to preserve angles. Area therefore scales by sec²(latitude), and the exaggeration accelerates towards the poles.

The distortion is a function of latitude alone. It is symmetric between hemispheres and independent of longitude. That is why Greenland, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia inflate, while Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and India, sitting near the equator, are rendered close to their true relative size and therefore appear small beside their swollen neighbours.

The Number the Campaign Is Built On

On a Mercator map the two look comparable. That single visual falsehood is the campaign’s exhibit.

Africa is large enough to contain the United States (9.83 million sq km), China (9.60 million sq km), India (3.29 million sq km) and most of Europe within its outline, with room remaining. Europe’s own area, at about 10.2 million sq km, is roughly a third of Africa’s, though the standard classroom Mercator suggests otherwise.

The Campaign and the Resolution

“Correct the Map” is a campaign by Speak Up Africa and Africa No Filter, launched in April 2026, initially aimed at schools and then at international organisations and media. It asked governments, media outlets, educational institutions and international organisations to adopt the Equal Earth projection.

Its significance is institutional as much as cartographic. The campaign was run in partnership with the African Union, the first time a pan-African institution has taken an official position on the visual representation of the continent. Togo carried it into the General Assembly.

The Vote

What the Resolution Does and Does Not Do

This distinction decides the Prelims question.

The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection and does not mandate a replacement. It is hortatory: General Assembly resolutions of this kind carry political and normative weight but impose no legal obligation on member states.

What it does is threefold:

• Encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use Equal Earth and other equal-area projections when relative size matters.
• Recognises the distortion as a legacy issue with consequences for perception in education, media and policy, described at the UN as having visually shrunk Africa for some 450 years.
• Asks that the limitations of any flat map in representing a spherical planet be taught, rather than substituting one uncritically accepted projection for another.

That final clause is the intellectually honest core of the resolution, and the one most likely to be missed. The claim is not that Equal Earth is the true map. There is no true flat map. The claim is that a projection should be chosen to fit its purpose, and that a projection built for maritime navigation was never fit for teaching children the relative size of continents.

What Equal Earth Is

Equal Earth is an equal-area pseudocylindrical projection developed in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. It was adopted soon afterwards by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In a pseudocylindrical projection the parallels remain straight horizontal lines but the meridians curve towards the poles, which lets the map shed the extreme corner stretching of rectangular projections while keeping a familiar overall shape.

Its design brief is the revealing part. Equal Earth was created as a direct response to the Boston Public Schools’ decision in March 2017 to adopt the Gall-Peters projection. Gall-Peters is equal-area and therefore corrects Mercator’s size distortion, but it does so at the cost of severe shape distortion, elongating landmasses into forms many cartographers found unacceptable. Equal Earth was engineered to be equal-area like Gall-Peters while looking like Robinson, whose proportions readers find visually natural. Its equations are also deliberately simple and fast to evaluate, which matters for adoption in software.

The Projections You Must Be Able to Distinguish

Winkel Tripel is worth remembering by name. Its “tripel” is German for triple, referring to Oswald Winkel’s aim of simultaneously minimising three kinds of distortion: area, direction and distance. The National Geographic Society adopted it in 1998, replacing the Robinson projection, and it remains the standard for its general world maps.

The Argument Has a History

This is not a new dispute, and the 2026 resolution is the latest turn in a quarrel that is more than 50 years old.

James Gall published the mathematics of the orthographic cylindrical equal-area projection in 1855. It attracted little attention.

In 1973 the German filmmaker and historian Arno Peters presented what he called the “Peters world map”, which he had devised in 1967. He claimed it was the first map to show the world fairly, and accused the Mercator projection of a systematic bias against developing nations. The political claim landed powerfully with aid agencies, churches and development organisations, and the map spread widely through them.

Professional cartographers reacted with fury, on two grounds. First, the projection was not new: it was mathematically identical to Gall’s 1855 work, and the Peters camp did not acknowledge Gall’s priority until the controversy had largely run its course late in Peters’s life. Second, they argued that trading one extreme distortion for another was not a correction but a substitution, and that Peters had misrepresented the properties of rival projections.

The professional response came in 1989 and 1990, when seven North American geographic organisations adopted a resolution rejecting all rectangular world maps for general use. That resolution rejected Mercator and Gall-Peters together, on the shared ground that rectangular projections inevitably distort at the corners. The North American Cartographic Information Society declined to endorse it.

The line that earns marks. The 1989 resolution is the detail that separates a shallow answer from an informed one. The cartographic profession did not defend Mercator against Peters. It rejected both, and it did so on technical grounds that apply equally to each. Equal Earth, arriving in 2018, is best understood as the eventual constructive answer to that 1989 rejection: an equal-area projection that is not rectangular, and therefore escapes the objection that felled Gall-Peters.

Why Mercator Did Not Actually Go Away

There is an irony in the timing. Mercator’s grip on the popular imagination today comes less from printed atlases than from the phone in the reader’s hand.

Web Mercator, catalogued as EPSG:3857, is a spherical variant of Mercator introduced by Google Maps in 2005 and now used by effectively every major slippy-map provider, including Google, Apple, Bing, Mapbox and OpenStreetMap.

It persists for engineering reasons, not ideological ones:

• It is the projection that tiles perfectly into squares. A map that must be served as a pyramid of square image tiles at many zoom levels needs a projection where each tile subdivides cleanly into four. Mercator does this; equal-area projections do not.
• It is conformal, so shapes stay correct at every zoom. For a street map, where the user is looking at a neighbourhood, local shape fidelity is exactly the property that matters and area distortion is negligible.
• It treats the Earth as a perfect sphere, which simplifies and accelerates the arithmetic of rendering.
• It is clipped at roughly 85.05° north and south, because the true poles project to infinity.

Google’s own fix is instructive. In 2018 Google Maps switched its zoomed-out desktop view to a 3D globe, so that at global scale Greenland shrinks to its true proportion. The company did not replace Mercator; it stopped using a flat map at the zoom level where a flat map lies most.

That is precisely the resolution’s logic. Use a conformal projection for navigation at street scale. Use an equal-area projection when the subject is the relative size of the world. The error was never Mercator’s existence; it was Mercator’s use as the default picture of the whole planet.

The India Angle

India’s own mapping practice already reflects the fit-the-projection-to-the-purpose principle.

The Survey of India, established in 1767, is the country’s principal mapping agency. Its projection choices have changed with technology and purpose:

• Historic printed topographic sheets were prepared on the Polyconic projection with the Everest datum.
• Modern digital Survey of India maps use the Lambert Conformal Conic projection with the WGS 84 datum.
• Open Series Maps are published on the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection with WGS 84.
• The standard topographic survey scale across India is 1:50,000.

Note what these have in common: for large-scale mapping of a country’s territory, where accurate local shape, angle and measurement matter for survey, revenue, engineering and defence, the chosen projections are conformal. India uses conformal projections for the job Mercator was invented for. The resolution concerns a different job entirely: the small-scale world map on a classroom wall.

The examinable point is that a country can rationally use a conformal projection for its topographic sheets and support an equal-area projection for world maps, with no contradiction. Purpose determines projection.

UPSC Relevance

GS Paper 1. Salient features of the world’s physical geography; fundamentals of maps, scale and map projections; the Survey of India as an institution.

GS Paper 2. Important international institutions, agencies and fora, their structure and mandate; the functioning of the UN General Assembly; groupings and the collective diplomacy of the global South.

The Mains framing. The strongest line is that representation is a form of power, and the most durable forms of it are the ones that present themselves as technical rather than political. A projection is an argument about the world encoded in an artefact that looks like neutral engineering. The resolution belongs with UN Security Council reform, IMF quota revision and the renaming of colonial-era geographic features as instances of the global South contesting inherited defaults. A sophisticated answer will add the counterpoint: the professional cartographers of 1989 were right that swapping one distortion for another is not truth-telling, and the resolution’s own instruction to teach the limits of every flat map is the correct response to that objection.

A question worth preparing. “No flat map can preserve area, shape, distance and direction simultaneously. In this light, critically examine the significance of the United Nations General Assembly’s 2026 resolution encouraging the use of equal-area map projections. (250 words)”

Prelims focus. Which property each projection preserves; that conformality and equivalence are mutually exclusive; Mercator 1569 and the rhumb-line property; the 14:1 Africa-to-Greenland ratio; Equal Earth’s 2018 authorship and equal-area character; Winkel Tripel adopted by National Geographic in 1998; the vote count and the sole dissenting state; the hortatory character of the resolution; Survey of India’s projections and datums.

📌 Facts Corner — Knowledgepedia

Prelims, statement-ready facts:

• The UN General Assembly adopted the “Correct the Map” resolution on 4 September 2026 by 164 votes to 1, with 6 abstentions.
• The United States was the only member state to vote against.
• Togo led the resolution at the United Nations.
• The campaign was run by Speak Up Africa and Africa No Filter, launched in April 2026, in partnership with the African Union.
• It was the first time a pan-African institution had taken an official position on the visual representation of the continent.
• The resolution encourages, but does not require, the use of Equal Earth and other equal-area projections; it is recommendatory, not binding.
• The Mercator projection was devised by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 and is a conformal cylindrical projection.
• On a Mercator map a rhumb line, or loxodrome, a course of constant compass bearing, appears as a straight line.
• Mercator’s area exaggeration scales as the square of the secant of the latitude, so it is a function of latitude alone.
• Africa is about 30.3 million sq km; Greenland is about 2.17 million sq km; Africa is roughly 14 times larger.
• Africa can contain the United States, China, India and most of Europe within its area.
• The Equal Earth projection is an equal-area pseudocylindrical projection developed in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny.
• Equal Earth was adopted by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
• Equal Earth was created in response to the Boston Public Schools’ adoption of the Gall-Peters projection in March 2017.
• James Gall published the orthographic cylindrical equal-area projection in 1855; Arno Peters presented the same projection as his own in 1973, having devised it in 1967.
• In 1989 and 1990 seven North American geographic organisations adopted a resolution rejecting all rectangular world maps, including both Mercator and Gall-Peters.
• The Winkel Tripel projection, devised by Oswald Winkel in 1921, replaced the Robinson projection as the National Geographic Society’s standard world map in 1998.
• Web Mercator, EPSG:3857, was introduced by Google Maps in 2005 and is clipped at about 85.05 degrees north and south.
• Google Maps introduced a 3D globe view for zoomed-out desktop maps in 2018.
• Tissot’s indicatrix is the standard device for visualising the distortion of a map projection.
• The Survey of India was established in 1767 and is India’s principal mapping agency; its standard topographic survey scale is 1:50,000.
• Survey of India digital maps use the Lambert Conformal Conic projection with the WGS 84 datum; Open Series Maps use UTM with WGS 84; older printed toposheets used the Polyconic projection with the Everest datum.

Prelims, the traps:

• The resolution does not ban Mercator and does not make Equal Earth compulsory.
• Equal-area and conformal are mutually exclusive properties. No projection can be both.
• Robinson and Winkel Tripel are compromise projections and are NOT equal-area. This is the most commonly set trap in this topic.
• Gall-Peters is equal-area but is not “the accurate map”; it distorts shape severely, and the cartographic profession rejected it alongside Mercator in 1989.
• Mercator’s distortion depends on latitude, not longitude, and affects both hemispheres equally. It is not a northern-hemisphere bias in the mathematical sense, although its practical effect favours temperate northern landmasses.
• Web Mercator and the classical Mercator are not identical: Web Mercator treats the Earth as a sphere rather than an ellipsoid.
• Equal Earth is pseudocylindrical, not cylindrical. Gall-Peters is cylindrical, which is why the 1989 resolution’s rejection of rectangular maps caught it.

Source: UN General Assembly Endorses the Equal Earth Projection — Ujiyari.com | Free UPSC & State PCS Current Affairs