The United Nations General Assembly has voted to adopt a new world map that more accurately reflects the size of Africa.
The “Correct the Map” resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by African Union members, was supported by 164 nations, including France and the United Kingdom. The United States was the only country to vote against it, while six countries abstained.
The UN vote is non-binding but is expected to lead to changes in maps used by institutions around the world.
The widely used Mercator map, which has been in use since the 16th Century, has been criticised for inaccurately depicting the relative sizes of countries and continents.
The projection makes Africa appear similar in size to Greenland, although Africa is 14 times larger.
The Mercator map was designed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to help European explorers navigate the world.
Its distortion results from the difficulty of accurately representing the surface of a globe on a two-dimensional map.
The map makes countries near the equator appear smaller than they are, while countries closer to the poles appear larger.
In 2018, a team of cartographers created the Equal Earth projection as an alternative equal-area map.
In February, the African Union’s 54 member states adopted the projection, saying it more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa.
Ahead of Friday’s vote, Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said: “A fair world begins with a fair map.”
He said “maps influence how peoples and continents are understood around the world.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot also backed the move, saying “France would stop using the Mercator map.”
However, Yaryna Ferencevych, a United States representative at the UN, criticised the resolution, saying “the General Assembly should focus on issues of international peace, prosperity and good relations.”
She described the debate over map projections as a distraction from those issues.
The campaign to change the map has also attracted support from African campaigners and geographers, who argue that the conventional representation of Africa has contributed to misconceptions about the continent’s size and potentia
BBC
