Some countries and territories, including Canada, Greenland and Russia, will soon look noticeably smaller on official United Nations (UN) maps.

The change stems from a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly: “Correct the map: rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world’s regions, particularly Africa.”

Spearheaded by Togo on behalf of the African Union, the resolution is framed as repairing 450 years of cartographic injustice by formally recognizing the distortion of the world as mapped through the Mercator projection. It was adopted almost unanimously: 164 votes in favor, one against and six abstentions. The United States the sole vote against.

A navigation tool with a built-in flaw

In 1569, Gerardus Mercator, a multitalented Flemish mapmaker who dedicated much of his life to drawing and projecting maps as accurately as possible, released a world map that used a clever new method of portraying the Earth on a flat surface.

The projection’s major benefit was its ability to represent rhumb lines — lines of constant compass bearing or direction — as straight lines, giving sailors accurate compass headings. That feature mattered enormously to Europeans during the era of exploration and colonization, and it is why the Mercator projection remains the standard for nautical charts today.

Yet the improved representation for navigation carried a major flaw: it excessively enlarged landmasses nearer to the poles. On a Mercator world map, Greenland appears roughly as large as Africa, even though Africa is in fact about 14 times bigger. In other words, North America, Russia and Europe appeared far bigger than Africa, South America and South Asia. The problem became acute when this projection, originally designed for navigation, turned into the de facto standard for all kinds of world maps, including political ones.

The “map wars”

Mercator’s technical distortion had long been known to mapmakers, but it was only in the 1970s that the way it embodied centuries of colonial ideologies was brought to light.

In 1973, German historian Arno Peters unveiled a new equal-area map projection that directly challenged the Mercator projection and the message it conveyed: Europe was not as big as it appeared on Mercator maps, while its former colonies were considerably larger. This type of projection had already been developed before, closely resembling an 1855 projection by James Gall, a Scottish clergyman and cartographer. What was new was the political vision of socially equitable cartography that inspired Peters.

Peters’s projection met a flood of criticism, igniting what became known as the “map wars,” but it was adopted by organizations such as Oxfam and UNESCO. Those organizations, along with Peters, clearly understood the political importance of map projections and the role maps play not only in representing reality but also in producing it.

Equal-area maps gain official backing

The recent UN resolution is another step toward addressing imbalances inherited from the past and, as Togo’s representative argued, it “paves the way for greater understanding, respect and peace among nations.” It follows smaller-scale precedents: in 2017, Boston Public Schools drew international attention when it adopted the Gall-Peters projection for its classrooms.

It calls for a proper representation of the world through the adoption of equal-area map projections, particularly the Equal Earth projection, a more recent and less controversial alternative to the Gall-Peters projection. Introduced in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, Equal Earth preserves accurate relative sizes without the pronounced stretching that drew criticism to the Gall-Peters map. Through the measure, the UN acknowledges centuries of colonial instrumentalization of the original Mercator projection.

Digital maps remain an open question

Although the resolution should contribute to a renewed vision of the world in schools and institutions across the globe, its impact on online mapping platforms remains to be seen. The Web Mercator projection, a variant of the original Mercator, remains the default for applications such as Google Maps, which has used it since its launch in 2005. It divides the Earth into squares, making it simple and computationally efficient to zoom smoothly back and forth across the world. The approach is precise at the local level, but it also dramatically increases the size of countries closer to the poles.

These online maps not only perpetuate the same distorted perspective as the original Mercator projection; they also infuse it with a worldview structured around road networks, business accessibility and the promotion of consumption. The new representation of the world endorsed by the UN resolution is a clear step toward equitable global representation, but it remains an interpretation.

Ukraine’s abstention

Ukraine abstained from the vote on the “correct the map” resolution. Its representatives said the country “endorses efforts to address historical distortions” but argued that this map legitimizes the “illegal annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014.”

Maps as instruments of power

Maps influence the world not only through how they represent the size of countries, but also through the kinds of information they emphasize, the technologies they mobilize, the businesses they promote, the ways they name places and the borders they draw.

Perhaps the main lesson of this UN resolution is that maps are not merely banal, inoffensive representations of the world; they are also instruments of power that aim to influence how we see the world and interact with it.

This article was written by Sébastien Caquard, Professor in Geography at Concordia University, and first published by The Conversation, distributed via Reuters. It appeared on Bworldonline.