The United Nations General Assembly voted Friday to adopt a resolution promoting a new world map that reflects the true relative sizes of continents, effectively making Africa appear significantly larger while shrinking the traditionally exaggerated depictions of North America and Europe, a move that drew sharp criticism from Washington. The measure, aimed at achieving "a more accurate representation" of continental landmasses, was adopted with overwhelming support, passing by 164 votes in favour, six abstentions, and a single vote against by the United States. 

The resolution, known as the "Correct the Map" initiative, was put forward by Togo on behalf of the African Group and backed by the African Union, alongside support from the Bahamas. Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told the General Assembly ahead of the vote that maps carry influence well beyond simple geography, noting that they shape our understanding of the world and guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions. The resolution formally endorses the Equal Earth cartographic projection, a modern mapping system that the resolution described as improving the accuracy of the cartographic representation of the world, and urges member states to favour it over the centuries-old Mercator projection. 

The Mercator projection, still one of the most widely used maps in the world, was created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to assist European sailors in navigation, allowing them to plot straight-line courses while maintaining a constant compass bearing. However, the map has long been criticised for distorting the true size of landmasses, enlarging regions closer to the poles such as North America, Europe and Greenland, while significantly shrinking the visual size of Africa, South America and parts of Southeast Asia relative to their actual geographic scale. The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by former US National Park Service cartographer Tom Patterson along with colleagues Bojan Šavrič and Bernie Jenny, was designed specifically to correct this imbalance by offering a more proportionally accurate depiction of the world's continents.

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The resolution itself is not legally binding and does not require any country, organisation or institution to abandon the Mercator projection outright. Instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to adopt equal-area map projections such as Equal Earth in contexts where the relative size of countries and continents matters, while also promoting broader education about the inherent limitations of any flat map in representing a three-dimensional globe. The United States was the only country to formally oppose the resolution, with its representatives dismissing the effort as part of what one official termed a "radical ideological project." 

A US deputy representative to the UN Economic and Social Council accused the organisation of promoting an ideological agenda and diverting attention from more pressing global issues, while another American diplomat criticised the General Assembly for spending time on the map issue rather than focusing on international peace and security matters. Six countries — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — abstained from the vote, with Ukraine's representative explaining that concerns centred not on the broader goal of correcting historic distortions affecting Africa, but on the way certain Equal Earth-based maps depict Ukrainian territories currently occupied by Russia, which Kyiv argued was inconsistent with UN resolutions affirming its territorial integrity.

The vote followed a sustained, years-long campaign led by advocacy groups such as Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, which argued that the Mercator projection has contributed to minimising perceptions of Africa's true scale, both geographically and in terms of its economic and developmental significance on the world stage. The African Union formally endorsed the Equal Earth projection in March, after which Togo, acting on the AU's behalf, formally requested in April that UN member states follow suit, setting in motion the drafting process that culminated in Friday's vote. Notably, France announced hours before the vote that it would abandon the Mercator projection in its own official maps, aligning itself with the broader push even though doing so would mean France, like the United States and Russia, would appear comparatively smaller on future Equal Earth-based maps.

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