The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution last Friday supporting the wider use of maps that more accurately reflect the true relative sizes of continents, particularly Africa.
The proposal, submitted by Togo and backed by the African Union Commission, received the support of 164 countries, with the United States alone voting against it.
The non-binding resolution seeks to encourage governments and institutions to use equal-area map projections, including the Equal Earth projection, instead of the Mercator projection that has remained widely used since the 16th century.
How Did the Old Map Represent the World?
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection developed by geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
The projection has been accused of significantly distorting regions south of the equator. One of the clearest examples can be seen by comparing Africa with Greenland.
On a Mercator map, Greenland can appear larger than Africa. In reality, however, Africa is around 14 times larger than Greenland.
Europe also appears relatively close to Africa in size on a Mercator map, despite its land area amounting to only around 33 per cent of Africa’s.
The Mercator projection does, however, offer an important advantage for navigation. It preserves directions and shapes in a way that allows navigational courses to be represented accurately, but this comes at the expense of accurately depicting area.
What Does an Equal-Area Map Change?
An equal-area projection is designed to preserve the relative area of every region shown on a map.
Such projections are widely used in thematic maps that illustrate the distribution of data, including population, agricultural land and forested areas.
However, preserving area does not eliminate distortion altogether. Equal-area projections also distort shapes, and the distortion can become more noticeable across larger mapped regions.
Continents may therefore appear stretched or compressed even when their relative sizes are represented accurately.
Distances are also not accurate in every direction. This is why the Mercator projection remains particularly effective for representing navigation routes and directions, despite the distortion it introduces to land area.
Is There a Completely Accurate Flat Map?
No flat map is 100 per cent accurate, regardless of the projection used, including equal-area projections. This is not simply a technical limitation, but a mathematical and geometric consequence of attempting to represent the Earth on a flat surface.
The Earth has an ellipsoidal surface, while a map is flat. A spherical or curved surface cannot be transferred onto a flat plane while simultaneously preserving every geometric property, including distance, area, angles and shape.
For this reason, globes remain the most accurate representation of the Earth because they more closely reproduce its actual form and do not depend on a flat-map projection.
Placing a Mercator projection over an equal-area projection makes the scale of the difference particularly visible, revealing how dramatically the familiar world map can alter perceptions of the relative sizes of continents.
