UN General Assembly Adopts 'Correct the Map' Resolution
The UN General Assembly has adopted a non-binding resolution promoting world maps that accurately reflect relative sizes of countries and continents. The initiative, put forward by African Union member states and the Bahamas, highlights severe geometric distortions in traditional cartography.
In a significant global development on 04 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly officially adopted a non-binding resolution titled 'Correct the Map'. The landmark measure is specifically designed to promote world maps that accurately reflect the true relative sizes of various countries and continents across the globe. For generations, standard global cartography has relied on projections that heavily distort geographic reality, leading to widespread misconceptions about the actual scale of different landmasses.
The diplomatic push behind the resolution came from a dedicated coalition consisting of African Union member states alongside the Bahamas. These nations successfully brought the initiative before the broader international community to address long-standing cartographic inequalities. When the final tally was recorded at the United Nations, a decisive 164 member states voted in favor of the resolution. Meanwhile, six member states chose to abstain from the vote, and the United States cast the sole vote against the measure.
At the core of the resolution's critique is the traditional Mercator projection, a widely used map design that was originally created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator all the way back in 1569. While the historical Mercator projection was useful for navigation, it notoriously enlarges landmasses that are located further away from the Equator while shrinking regions near it. To illustrate the severe scale of these distortions, geographic data points out that Africa is actually about 14 times larger than Greenland, despite appearing roughly comparable in size on traditional Mercator maps.
In place of the outdated 1569 design, the newly adopted UN General Assembly resolution actively promotes the use of the Equal Earth projection. Introduced relatively recently in 2018, the Equal Earth projection was specifically developed to address the visual imbalances of older models by showing countries and continents with their correct relative sizes. Proponents of the resolution hope that international adoption of the Equal Earth projection will foster a more geographically accurate understanding of the world.
