UN Votes to Redraw World Map
- 33 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The UN General Assembly has voted to replace the traditional world map with one that more accurately reflects the size of Africa, and reduces the size of Britain and the US.
The "Correct the Map" resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by African Union (AU) members, passed with the support of 164 nations, including France and the UK. The US was the only nation to vote against it - while there were six abstentions. The UN vote is non-binding but will see changes to the maps used by institutions around the world.
The Mercator map, which has been in common use since the 16th Century, has come in for criticism as it shows Africa as being of similar in size to Greenland, even though it is actually 14 times larger. Ahead of the vote, the Togolese Foreign Minister told news agency Reuters: "A fair world begins with a fair map." Whilst a petition on Change.org said: “You could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare,”
The Mercator map was designed in 1569 by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to help European explorers navigate across the world. The distortion of his map is a result of the fact that it is impossible to accurately represent the surface of a globe on a two-dimensional chart. Whenever a map of the world is drawn, compromises need to be made.
The Mercator map accommodates for the curvature of the Earth by making countries near the equator seem smaller than they are, with countries nearer the poles appearing larger. In an effort to address this, a team of cartographers in 2018 created an equal area map they called the Equal Earth projection.
