The U.N. Adopts New Map Showing Africa’s True Size

BYYassine Hariss

September 7, 2026

It only took 29,535 days for the United Nations (U.N.) to finally adopt a map that shows Africa closer to its true size. A little over 80 years after the organization was founded, the world governing body is finally ditching the centuries-old map projection that has long made the African continent appear considerably smaller than it actually is.

And no, Africa didn’t suddenly grow overnight. Until now, the maps most of us have spent our entire lives looking at have long given us a pretty warped idea of how big different parts of the world actually are. On the widely used Mercator projection, countries and continents become increasingly distorted the further they sit from the equator, making places like Greenland, Canada, and Russia appear much larger than they really are. On the other hand, Africa gets the opposite treatment.

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In a vote of 164 to one, the U.N. endorsed a resolution encouraging the use of map projections that more accurately represent the relative size of continents. According to a statement issued by the U.N., the vote allegedly marks the culmination of an African-led campaign challenging the centuries-old dominance of the Mercator projection and the distorted picture of the world it can create. This doesn’t mean that they’re banning Mercator maps or telling everyone to throw their old atlases in the bin. Instead, the resolution wants to encourage schools, governments, and international organizations, amongst others, to use projections such as Equal Earth, alongside other equal-area maps, whenever possible.

In a recent article, MILLE editor-in-chief Khaoula Ghanem argued that cartography, regardless of how we choose to look at it, is inherently political, carrying with it a colonial legacy that still permeates the way we see and understand the world today. As she wrote, “the Mercator map became popular during the height of European imperial expansion because it inflated the landmasses of those very empires. Power looked big because it needed to.”

Today, that way of looking at the world is finally being challenged at its highest institutional level. And sure, swapping one map projection for another might seem like a fairly insignificant victory in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it won’t undo centuries of colonial thinking, nor will it suddenly change Africa’s place in the world. But after spending centuries quite literally being made to look smaller than it is, being represented a little more accurately feels like a decent step forward, for whatever it may be worth.

And by the way, if you were wondering who cast the only vote against the resolution, congratulations, you guessed correctly: the United States.

The U.N. Adopts New Map Showing Africa’s True Size

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