Maps Will Change to Show Countries' True Sizes Under UN Resolution
- On Friday, Togo leads a UN vote on a resolution urging adoption of the Equal Earth projection to replace the Mercator map, which distorts the size of Africa and other equatorial regions.
- Historians and geographers have long criticized the Mercator map for reflecting Western assumptions; some scholars use the term 'cartographic colonialism' to describe its negative effects on equatorial representation.
- Africa is 14 times larger than the Danish territory of Greenland, yet appears similarly sized on Mercator maps. A petition on Change, #CorrectTheMap, gathered around 11,000 signatures ahead of Friday's vote.
- Dussey connected the map campaign to an African Union-backed resolution passed in March describing the transatlantic slave trade as the 'gravest crime against humanity,' approved by 123 states with 52 abstentions.
- Early next year, Togo will host an implementation event in Lom with Unesco, the African Union, and Google Maps to establish the Equal Earth projection as a global standard.
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This announcement comes at a time when a text will be presented to the United Nations on Friday for adoption, calling for fairer or more scientific mapping and more faithful to the real size of the continents.
BT
avisendanmark.dkThe UN will soon vote on an official phasing out of world maps that show Africa the size of Greenland.
UN set to vote to scrap century-old world map and 'shrink' Britain to combat 'Western biases'
The United Nations General Assembly is set to vote today on a landmark resolution calling for the global phase-out of the centuries-old world map.The Mercator projection is used worldwide and is an international standard for marine navigation because it preserves angles and directions.However, critics highlight that it projects a spherical Earth onto a flat, rectangular surface, creating massive distortions in the relative sizes of landmasses th…
As part of a movement led by the African Union, Paris announced on Friday 4 September that it would abandon the so-called "Mercator" projection. To respect reality, France's place will now be smaller on the planets.
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