Togo celebrates as UN backs a more accurate world map, while US calls vote a “mockery”

Togo scored a diplomatic victory at the United Nations on Friday, as the General Assembly adopted a resolution promoting world maps that better reflect the actual size of the continents. The vote was 164 to one, with the United States casting the only opposing vote and six countries abstaining.

The resolution encourages international organizations and states to use the Equal Earth projection. It does not prohibit Mercator or impose a single replacement. Instead, it urges governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use Equal Earth and other equal-area maps when relative size matters, while teaching the limits of any flat map of a spherical planet.

Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey presented the measure as more than a technical cartography issue. “Maps shape our understanding of the world,” he told the assembly. “They guide education, fuel imagination and influence collective perceptions. Therefore, they are never neutral: when they present a distorted image of our planet, they risk perpetuating mistaken representations passed down from generation to generation.”

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Maps shape our understanding of the world. They guide education, fuel imagination and influence collective perceptions. Therefore, they are never neutral: when they present a distorted image of our planet, they risk perpetuating mistaken representations passed down from generation to generation.

The Mercator projection, named after Flemish geographer, cartographer, philosopher and theologian Gerardus Mercator, was created for maritime navigation. It preserves the shapes and angles of land masses relatively well, but exaggerates the size of territories at higher latitudes and compresses equatorial regions. Europe and North America therefore appear much larger, while Africa and South America appear smaller.

Equal Earth, launched by a group of cartographers in 2018, makes Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Oceania appear substantially larger. Cartographer Bojan Savric told AFP in 2025 that the projection preserves the continents’ relative areas and shows their shapes as they appear on a globe as far as possible. The resolution’s backing from the European Union countries gave the African-led initiative broad support, even as Washington rejected it.

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Equal Earth preserves the relative areas of the continents and, as far as possible, shows their shapes as they appear on a globe.