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🇦🇹 Austria /Culture & Society

Equal Earth map sparks debate: Is it time to end the distorted world?

From Der Standard · () German

Translated from German and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Analysis Sources not specified Ongoing story
  • The United Nations is debating whether to promote the Equal Earth projection, which represents Africa’s size more accurately than the commonly used world map.
  • Togo placed the issue on the agenda of an African Union summit in Addis Ababa, helping build broad support for the proposal.
  • The initiative still faces opposition, although the article says critics are motivated by different concerns.

Africa looks much smaller than it really is on the world map most people use. The United Nations now wants to correct that, but the effort has encountered resistance from very different sides.

At the center of the debate is the Equal Earth projection, developed by cartographers in 2018. The map seeks to represent the relative size of continents more accurately than the familiar projection, particularly in Africa’s case.

The issue reached the international agenda after Togo placed it before the African Union summit in Addis Ababa in February. By Friday, the small West African country had achieved something that is rare in international diplomacy: bringing almost everyone behind the change.

Yet agreement is not complete. The proposal continues to face opposition, with critics objecting for reasons that differ sharply from one another. The debate therefore concerns not only how the world is drawn, but also which map should become the accepted visual reference for it.

About this summary

Originally published by Der Standard in German. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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