Back in the summer of 2025, I wrote about the African Union’s push to replace the Mercator projection with an equal-area alternative as an ideologically charged campaign rooted in grievance politics rather than practical cartography.
The Mercator map that these morons were complaining about enlarges high-latitude landmasses for an extremely valuable trade-off: it preserves angles and allows for accurate direction-finding.
Despite its downside – distortion of size near the poles, the Mercator’s ability to maintain accurate directions and shapes is still its big selling point. It’s a trade-off that has proven successful for many forms of navigation, from historical sea voyages to today’s digital map searches. So even after centuries, the Mercator projection still plays a crucial role in how we explore and understand our planet.
Despite the massive poverty afflicting large swaths of Africa, a deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, active wars at various spots around the globe, and drug cartels that effectively control territory and institutions in some countries, the United Nations has found time and energy to adopt “Equal Earth”.
The United States was the only country to vote against this inanity.
Friday’s resolution, which was sponsored by Togo and backed by members of the African Union, was passed with 164 member states voting in favor. Only the U.S. voted against it while six other countries – Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine – abstained.The vote encourages governments and institutions around the world to replace the traditional Mercator map, commonly used since the 16th Century, with the Equal Earth projection that advocates and geographers say shows locations more accurately….Friday’s resolution does not ban the Mercator projection or impose a replacement, but only encourages the use of the Equal Earth projection, the U.N. said in its report.”Maps shape our understanding of the world,” the global body quoted Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey as saying before the vote. “They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.”
The Mercator projection makes Greenland and Africa appear roughly equal in size, but the Equal Earth projection preserves their relative proportions—revealing that Africa is actually about 14 times larger than Greenland.
Because surely that enlargement will make the African continent more prosperous and a healthier place to live.
The American representative shared my skepticism.
Yaryna Ferencevych, the deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, said the resolution was presented as “an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions” but was, in her view, part of a “much larger and more radical ideological project.””Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and cognitive justice,” Ferencevych said Friday during the 114th Plenary meeting.”Resolutions like this one and the ideological agenda they promote are barnacles on our work here and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.”Ferencevych was referring to the Mercator projection, created in 1569 to aid maritime navigation. To this day, it is seen as the traditional world map and is used in many school textbooks and atlases.
And while UN bureaucrats may be celebrating this big achievement, Equal Earth isn’t a perfect map either.
It gives up some of the features that made Mercator useful for navigation.Straight lines on the Earth do not work in the same way as they do on Mercator. It also cannot be used to measure the true distance between different places perfectly. This is because there is no flat map that can preserve everything at once.As UCL cartography professor James Cheshire explained, “A map can preserve area, shape, distance and direction to different degrees but it cannot preserve all of them perfectly.”
The Equal Earth vote may make race-activists feel good, but it will not stop wars, fight Ebola, break drug-cartel power, or improve the lives of people living in poverty.
The fact that bureaucrats from 164 countries could unite behind a meaningless, nonbinding resolution about map preferences while the U.N. struggles with real crises says everything about the institution’s priorities.
In that respect, the vote’s greatest value was showing just how much the U.N. has become a forum for empty gestures rather than serious action.
Finally: Here is something the African bureaucrats should be worried about…the economic size of countries, in map form.
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