The UN general assembly has voted to replace the traditional world map with one that more accurately reflects the size of all nations.

The approved resolution calls for the world to move away from the traditional Mercator map, which shrinks the size of Africa and exaggerates northern landmasses.

The “Correct the Map” resolution, sponsored by Togo, passed with the support of 164 nations, including the UK. The US was the only nation to vote against it, with six other abstentions.

The resolution is non-binding, but asks governments, schools, international organisations, and technology companies to adopt the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps wherever the true scale of continents matters, with the aim of establishing more proportionally accurate maps as a new global norm. It does not seek to ban the Mercator projection outright.

The Mercator projection, which is currently used worldwide, increases distortion the further a region sits from the equator. Since Africa straddles the equator, it seems comparatively smaller than its actual size, while Europe, North America, Greenland, and Russia all appear substantially larger than they are.

As a result, Africa, along with Latin America, India and other equatorial regions, appear much smaller relative to northern countries than their true area. The map, for example, depicts Africa as similar in size to Greenland, despite the continent being 14 times larger than the Danish territory.

In a briefing to the African Group at the UN this week, Togo’s foreign minister Robert Dussey said the importance of the issue went beyond geography.

“A map is never neutral,” Mr Dussey reasoned. “It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood, and may, sometimes from the earliest years of schooling, perpetuate representations that do not correspond to geographic reality.”

“Africa is not asking for preferential treatment,” he said. “Africa is asking that its reality, aspirations and contribution to the international system be duly taken into account.”

“I’m an academic before a politician,” Mr Dussey said. “As an academic, I say we have to have as large a consensus as possible, because we are here at the UN, we never know.”

A petition on the fundraising platform Change for the campaign, called #CorrectTheMap, had gathered around 11,000 signatures ahead of the vote. The African Union endorsed the campaign in August 2025 and asked Togo to lead the push for its adoption at the UN.

“As Africa becomes increasingly central to solving global challenges,” the petition says, “it is critical to represent its true scale.”

Historians and geographers have long argued that the Mercator map reflects Western assumptions about the world, and some campaigners have used the term “cartographic colonialism” to denounce what they have described as its negative effects.

German historian Arno Peters was one of the most prominent critics of the projection, launching an alternative map based on the Gall-Peters projection in 1973. Togo’s campaign is instead promoting the 2018 Equal Earth map, developed by an international team of cartographers, which supporters say offers a more accurate representation of the size of every continent.

Mr Dussey connected the map campaign to another African Union-backed resolution passed at the UN in March which described the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and was approved by 123 states, with three against and 52 abstentions.

Togo’s government is now set to hold an event in the capital, Lomé, with Unesco, the African Union, and technology companies including Google Maps in the first quarter of next year to work out how the change may be implemented.