For centuries, millions of people have looked at a world map without realizing that what they were seeing was not an accurate comparison of the Earth’s landmasses. Now, the United Nations has taken a significant step toward changing that.

On September 4, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution encouraging the use of a world-map projection that represents the relative size of continents more accurately.

The initiative, championed by Togo on behalf of African nations and supported by the African Union, promotes a projection known as Equal Earth. The resolution received overwhelming international support, with 164 countries voting in favour, six abstaining and only the United States voting against it. 

To understand why a map became a subject of international debate, we have to go back more than 450 years.

The Map Most of Us Grew Up With

Many of the world maps familiar to generations of schoolchildren are based on the Mercator projection, developed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

Mercator’s map was not originally designed to teach people how large countries were in comparison with one another. It was particularly useful for navigation, because it preserved directions and angles in ways that helped sailors plot courses across the oceans.

The difficulty appears when that projection is used as a general picture of the world.

Earth is a sphere. A world map is flat.

Turning a three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional rectangle inevitably creates distortion. The Mercator projection dramatically enlarges areas as they move closer to the North and South Poles.

That means places such as Greenland, northern Europe, Russia and Canada appear disproportionately large, while regions closer to the equator including much of Africa appear smaller in comparison. 

The result is startling.

On many Mercator maps, Greenland can appear almost comparable in size to Africa.

In reality, Africa is approximately 14 times larger than Greenland. Africa covers roughly 30 million square kilometres, while Greenland covers just over 2 million. 

Think about that for a moment.

This is not a tiny mathematical difference.

It is an enormous visual difference.

Equal Earth Changes the Perspective

The alternative backed by the UN resolution is called the Equal Earth projection.

It was developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. Unlike Mercator, Equal Earth is an equal-area projection, meaning that the relative surface area of countries and continents is maintained.

If one region is twice as large as another in reality, its mapped area will also be twice as large.

Africa therefore begins to look like what it actually is: an enormous continent. 

There is still an important scientific point to understand. No flat map can reproduce a spherical Earth perfectly. A projection may preserve area while altering shape, distance or direction.

So the Equal Earth map should not be understood as a magical, completely distortion-free map.

What it does particularly well is correct the relative-size distortion that has shaped the familiar image of the world for generations.

Why Does the Size of Africa on a Map Matter?

Some may reasonably ask: It’s only a map. Why does it matter?

Because maps do more than tell us where places are. They help build our mental picture of the world.

A child repeatedly looking at a map in which one region visually dominates another is absorbing information long before that child begins studying economics, population, resources, history or geopolitics.

Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey captured this idea when speaking about the initiative, saying that maps influence education, imagination and collective perceptions and that may be the deeper story here.

Scale communicates significance.

When a continent is visually reduced for generation after generation, its physical magnitude can also become psychologically underestimated.

Africa is not a country or a small region sitting beneath Europe.

It is a continent of 54 internationally recognized sovereign states, stretching across an extraordinary geographical area, with immense cultural, linguistic, ecological and economic diversity.

Changing how that continent appears on the world’s classroom walls will not automatically change Africa’s economies, governments or societies  but representation matters because what we repeatedly see can influence what we instinctively believe.

Should the world’s most familiar maps show countries according to inherited convention, or should they increasingly reflect geographical proportions as accurately as modern cartography allows?

The African Union believes the answer is clear.

Following the UN vote, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission described the resolution as an important step toward representing Africa according to scientifically established geographical realities and encouraged educational systems, publishers, digital platforms and international institutions to progressively adopt more accurate cartographic representations. 

Will Every Map Now Change?

Not immediately.

The UN General Assembly resolution is non-binding.

It does not prohibit the Mercator projection, nor does it suggest that Mercator should disappear from the specialized navigation applications for which it remains useful.

Instead, it encourages broader adoption of Equal Earth and other accurate representations where comparing landmass size matters, particularly in education, publishing, media and digital mapping. 

That means the real transformation may happen gradually.

Classroom maps may change, textbooks, news graphics, digital platforms and perhaps, eventually, the mental picture many of us carry of the planet will change too.

A Map Does Not Change Africa. It Changes How We See Africa.

Africa did not suddenly become larger on September 4, 2026.

Africa was always that large.

The geography did not change, measurement did not change nor did the continent expand.

The representation is what is being challenged and perhaps that is the larger lesson hidden inside what at first appears to be merely a conversation about cartography:

Sometimes something does not need to become greater, we simply need to see it according to its true dimensions.