What gets smaller

The document runs to five pages and it is worth reading before reading anything written about it. It is A/80/L.104, circulated on 4 August 2026, adopted a month later, on the day the Assembly completed the substantive work of its eightieth session. Fifty‑five states put their names on the cover: fifty‑four African states, in alphabetical order from Algeria to Zimbabwe, and the Bahamas.

The recorded vote was 164 in favour, one against, six abstentions. The one against was the United States. The six abstentions were Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine. Twenty‑two delegations did not vote at all, out of a total voting membership of 193. The text became resolution A/RES/80/307.

What the text says, and what it does not

It does not ban anything. The operative verbs are encourages, invites, urges — the vocabulary of a body that cannot compel a school to buy a different poster. Paragraph 5 encourages states and organisations “to adopt, disseminate and use the Equal Earth cartographic projection and equal area map projection methods, which more accurately reproduce the actual areas of the continents, where their sizes are critical.” That last clause is doing real work: nobody is being asked to navigate a ship on an equal‑area map, and the preamble says so, declaring itself “without prejudice to the established practice with regard to the use of cartographic material for navigational purposes.”

It also does something a political document rarely does, which is concede the limits of its own premise. The preamble recognises “that no single projection can perfectly represent the curved surface of the Earth on a plane, and that each projection is therefore suited to particular purposes.” Every flat map gives something up. This one is choosing what to give up.

The regions the text names as shrunk are Africa, Latin America and South Asia. It notes “with concern that this distortion contributes to minimizing the perceived sizes of Africa, Latin America and South Asia, and perpetuating an unbalanced view of the world.” It calls the correction “an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation.”

Search the full text for the countries that lose the most page area and you will not find them. Russia: no occurrences. Greenland: none. Canada, Norway: none. Not one of the enlarged parties is named anywhere in the resolution that reduces them. The text is written entirely from the point of view of the shrunken.

The numbers, from the tables rather than from memory

The United Nations publishes the areas itself, in the Demographic Yearbook, and it is worth being fussy about which table you take them from, because the yearbook uses two different measures and they are not interchangeable.

Table 3 gives surface area by country. The Russian Federation: 17,098,246 km². Greenland: 2,166,086 km². Table 1 gives land area by region, in thousands. Africa: 29,648 — that is 29,648,000 km² — against a world total of 130,094 thousand. Surface area includes inland water and land area does not, so the two columns are not a ratio waiting to be calculated, and I am not going to calculate one for you. What they are is a floor: whatever the exact figure, Africa is a great deal larger than Russia, and Greenland is smaller than either by a wide margin.

On a Mercator map it is. “Greenland for instance can look roughly comparable in size to Africa, even though Africa is about 14 times larger,” the UN’s own news service put it on the day of the vote. CNN gave the same comparison a sharper edge: in reality, Greenland is roughly the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Gerardus Mercator was not trying to do this. He devised the projection in 1569 to solve a navigation problem, and it solves it beautifully: a straight line on his map is a constant compass bearing, which is exactly what a sailor wants and exactly what a globe will not give you on a flat sheet. The price of holding direction true is area, and the bill comes due towards the poles. Everything far from the equator swells. The projection is doing what it was built to do. It has been asked, for four and a half centuries, to do something else as well.

The room

Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign minister, introduced the text on behalf of the African Group and spent part of his introduction insisting on what it was not. “Our approach is not directed against any nation, any civilization or any cartographic tradition,” he said. His summary of the case has been quoted everywhere since, and it is a good line: “A fair map does not change the geography of the world; it changes how we see the world.”

Then the Russian Federation’s representative spoke, and said her country supported it. In the roll‑call the entry reads: Y — Russian Federation.

The meeting record is plain about this. “Expressing support for the text, the Russian Federation’s representative said that Moscow has been consistent in its advocacy for overcoming the legacy of colonialism, and for combating the practice of neo‑colonialism. Her country therefore supports African States’ independent efforts to restore historic justice and strengthen Africa’s role as one of the unique and influential centres of the contemporary multipolar world.” The statement says nothing about size, and I am not going to supply the reasoning it left out. This is the first of the two places in this piece where I will say plainly that I find something remarkable, and it is this: one of the three states France’s foreign minister named that same day as taking on “disproportionate visual prominence” spent its speaking time endorsing the correction, and then voted for it. So did Canada. So did Norway. So did China.

The United States went the other way, before the vote and again after it. Its representative said that while the draft is presented as an “anodyne” effort to update cartography, “it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to,” and that resolutions of this kind are “barnacles on our work here and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.” Yaryna Ferencevych, deputy US representative to the Economic and Social Council, repeated the barnacle line in a statement afterwards.

Ukraine’s abstention was not about size. Ukraine said it did not oppose the core principles. What it objected to was that the Equal Earth map “depicts parts of Ukraine’s territory that have been temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation ‘in a manner that is wholly unacceptable’,” and that this sits badly with every Assembly resolution on non‑recognition of the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Its representative warned that endorsing a projection without safeguards could open a “Pandora’s box.”

Here a distinction is worth making, because the record makes it. A projection is a pair of equations. It converts latitude and longitude into x and y; it has no opinion about borders, because it has never heard of them. What Ukraine and, in gentler language, the European Union were objecting to is not the mathematics but the particular maps drawn with it and published on the Equal Earth website. The EU said as much: its support “did not constitute an endorsement of the maps displayed on the Equal Earth website,” and, speaking through Ireland, it stressed that the resolution “neither addresses nor affects questions relating to sovereignty, territorial status, delimitation or internationally recognized borders of States.” The same yearbook I took the areas from carries a footnote on the Russian population figures noting that they include Crimea and Sevastopol, “temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation.” That footnote is attached to the population column. The area column has no footnote at all.

France, which named names

One official did say out loud which countries get smaller, and he did it hours before the vote, at the Sorbonne, about his own.

Jean‑Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, announced that his ministry would drop Mercator. The wording reported by the wire services is that the ministry “will abandon the Mercator projection in favour of map representations tailored to specific uses, more faithful to actual surface areas and in line with the recommendations of cartographers and scientists.” Then he named the beneficiaries of the old arrangement: “The United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual prominence compared to Africa, Latin America or southeast Asia.” Distortions, he added, “eventually take root in perceptions,” and “the time has come to correct them.”

France shrinks too, and the UN’s own account of the day made the point without being asked: the shift “means France itself, like the United States and Russia, will appear smaller relative to equatorial countries.” It also supplied the correction that most coverage of this story gets backwards. “Equal‑area maps do not make Africa larger; they remove the exaggeration Mercator gives landmasses closer to the poles.”

Now the hard part

Every account of this vote, including the resolution itself, rests on a claim about the inside of people’s heads: that looking at Mercator maps for a lifetime leaves you believing Africa is smaller than it is. It is an extremely plausible claim. It has been the animating idea of map reform for decades: Arno Peters, as one review of the field puts it, “aimed to empower countries that he felt had been discriminated by cartography,” and in 2017 Boston Public Schools announced it would start using Gall–Peters maps in its classrooms with the goal, as that review quotes it, of “decolonize the curriculum.” It is also, in the specific form that can be tested, a claim that has repeatedly failed to survive testing.

The name for the claim in the literature is the Mercator effect. Daniel Montello and Sarah Battersby, who have returned to the question over more than a decade, define it as “the widespread and persistent belief among cartographers and others that people’s global‑scale cognitive maps are distorted in a particular way because of their exposure to world maps displayed with the common Mercator projection.” Battersby and Montello went looking for it in 2009, in a study of area estimates published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and did not find it. Others looked again. “Recent studies, however, have found no evidence for a Mercator effect on recalled areas for world regions,” the two of them wrote in 2022.

The widest net was cast online. Lieselot Lapon, Kristien Ooms and Philippe De Maeyer built a short test that asked people to estimate the real land area of countries, regions and continents, and ran it worldwide. “More than 130,000 people worldwide participated.” Their conclusion, in full: “The results indicate that the accuracy differs with the map projection but not to the extent that one’s global‑scale cognitive map is a reflection of a particular map projection.” Something is going on; it is not a projection stamped on the mind.

Be careful about what this does and does not overturn. What has failed to replicate is one specific, testable proposition: that Mercator exposure inflates the areas people recall for polar regions relative to equatorial ones. The resolution’s claim is broader and softer — “symbolic minimization,” effects on education, on development narratives, on what a continent is assumed to be worth attending to. Those are different constructs, and nobody has shown them to be false. They have mostly not been measured at all. A failed test of one proposition is not a verdict on its neighbours, and treating it as one would be the same error in the opposite direction.

Where the effect actually turned up

In 2022 Montello and Battersby ran the experiment again, at two universities, with one addition. Alongside the area questions they asked respondents to estimate great‑circle directions — “as a jet would fly” — from their home city to various world cities. The areas behaved as before. The directions did not.

“We again find no support for a Mercator effect on areas estimated from memory,” they wrote, “but our novel collection of spherical direction estimates provides clear evidence of a Mercator effect (or that of a similar rectangular projection) on directional beliefs.” They drew from it a conclusion about the mind rather than about maps: “These results confirm that cognitive maps are not unitary, analogue mental structures but collections of beliefs stored in different formats in separate mental structures that are not necessarily mutually coordinated and integrated.”

This is the second thing in this piece I will admit to finding remarkable. The rectangular map does get into people, measurably, but not in the place four centuries of argument has been pointing. What it appears to leave behind is not a belief about how big Greenland is, but a belief about which way things lie: on a globe the short way between two distant cities bends towards the pole, and on a rectangle it does not. If you have ever been surprised that the short way between two far‑apart northern cities bends up towards the pole rather than running straight across the page, that surprise is the effect the researchers can actually find.

None of which settles whether a map can make a continent seem to matter less. It relocates the question. What the researchers report is that the mind does not store one map. It stores several, in different formats, and they are “not necessarily mutually coordinated and integrated.”

What will not change on your phone

Paragraph 8 “urges global technology platforms to engage in constructive dialogue.” It is the softest verb in the document aimed at the hardest target.

The web runs on Mercator, and not as a habit — as a coordinate system. Google’s own developer documentation states it without apology: “World coordinates are derived from latitude/longitude using the Mercator projection,” and the base map imagery is cut off “at approximately +/- 85 degrees to make the resulting map shape square, which allows easier logic for tile selection.” The registry entry for the projection that does this, EPSG:3857, lists its users by name — “Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing, ArcGIS, ESRI” — describes its scope as “Web mapping and visualisation,” and, in the remarks field, records that it is “Not a recognised geodetic system.”

Note what Google gives as the reason for the cut: not accuracy, but “easier logic for tile selection.” The square tile is the unit the whole apparatus is built from. And the property Mercator preserves is the one it was designed for: a straight line on the map is a constant compass bearing. So the resolution’s reach is the wall map, the textbook, the graphic behind the newsreader, the atlas a nine‑year‑old opens on the floor. Those are large places. They are also not the map in your pocket, which will go on making Greenland enormous.

What happens next, on the record

Togo says it means to change its own school geography materials by the end of the year. Moky Makura of Africa No Filter, whose campaign put the argument in front of the African Union, framed the day as a beginning rather than a result: “We want to see accurate maps in schools, textbooks, newsrooms, businesses and on the digital platforms billions of people use every day.” Her sharper sentence was the one about method: “If we got something as basic as Africa’s size wrong for this long, what else about Africa have we simply accepted without questioning?”

Tom Patterson, who made Equal Earth in 2018 with Bojan Šavrič and Bernhard Jenny, found out the way the rest of us did. “Wow,” he wrote on social media, as quoted by NPR. “When we created the Equal Earth projection in 2018, we never imagined this.”

The resolution asks the Secretary‑General to report on its implementation up to and including the eighty‑third session, and puts an item on that session’s provisional agenda under a title nobody will quote: “Promotion of accurate cartographic representation of continents for educational and socioeconomic purposes and strengthening of technical assistance in geospatial capabilities of developing countries.” Until then, the Secretary‑General is to fold what he has to report into “relevant existing reports,” “within existing resources.”

Watch it land

Every stream on this site is embedded from the broadcaster’s own official channel. For this story: Al Jazeera English, FRANCE 24 English for the Paris announcement, SABC News and Channels Television from the continent whose case this was, and United Nations for the chamber itself. Or open the full channel list and pick your own.

Sources

• United Nations General Assembly, A/80/L.104, “‘Correct the map’: rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world’s regions, particularly Africa” (draft resolution, distributed 4 August 2026) — the sponsor list, the operative paragraphs, the navigation carve‑out, the “no single projection” concession, the regions named, “cognitive justice and memorial reparation,” and the reporting requirement. The absence of any mention of Russia, Greenland, Canada or Norway was checked against the full text of this document.
• UN Meetings Coverage, “General Assembly Adopts Text to ‘Correct the Map’” (GA/12779, 114th and 115th meetings, 4 September 2026) — the recorded vote and its breakdown, Robert Dussey’s introduction, the Russian Federation’s statement of support, the United States’ explanation of vote, Ukraine’s objection, and Ireland’s statement for the European Union.
• United Nations Digital Library, voting record for resolution A/RES/80/307 (vote date 4 September 2026) — the vote summary including the twenty-two non-voting delegations, the resolution and meeting-record symbols, and the individual entries quoted here.
• UN News, “UN tells the world: Stop making Africa look small” (4 September 2026) — Mercator’s 1569 purpose and its area cost, the Greenland comparison, the French announcement, the “Pandora’s box” warning, the EU’s note on the Equal Earth website, and the point that equal‑area maps enlarge nothing.
• Al Jazeera with AFP and Reuters, “UN votes to adopt new world map that reflects Africa’s true size” (4 September 2026) — Jean‑Noël Barrot’s Sorbonne remarks, quoted in translation by Al Jazeera (AFP/Reuters) and by CNN (which attributes them to France 24), France’s reported co‑sponsorship, the Togolese ministry’s navigation statement, Moky Makura’s statement, and Dussey’s remarks to Reuters. The same Barrot quotations appear in CNN’s report of the same day, which is also the source for Greenland compared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• Jewel Bright, NPR, “The U.N. backs a new world map showing Africa in its true relative size” (4 September 2026) — Yaryna Ferencevych’s statement, the African Union’s response, and Tom Patterson’s reaction and earlier remarks.
• United Nations Statistics Division, Demographic Yearbook 2023, Table 3 (surface area by country) and Table 1 (land area by region) — the figures for the Russian Federation, Greenland, Africa and the world, and the footnote on the Russian population figures.
• Daniel R. Montello and Sarah E. Battersby, “Another Look at the ‘Mercator Effect’ on Global‑Scale Cognitive Maps: Not in Areas but in Directions,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112(2), 2022, pp. 468–486 (doi:10.1080/24694452.2021.1931001) — the definition of the Mercator effect, the replication on areas, and the direction result. The full article is behind a subscription; everything quoted here is from the published abstract.
• Lieselot Lapon, Kristien Ooms and Philippe De Maeyer, “The Influence of Map Projections on People’s Global‑Scale Cognitive Map: A Worldwide Study,” ISPRS International Journal of Geo‑Information 9(4):196, 2020 (doi:10.3390/ijgi9040196, CC BY) — the 130,000‑participant study and its conclusion. Article page: mdpi.com; abstract as quoted retrieved from DOAJ.
• Gabriela Molina León, Michael Lischka and Andreas Breiter (University of Bremen), “Mapping the Global South: Equal-Area Projections for Choropleth Maps” (IEEE VIS 2020, authors’ version) — the summary of the replication record, Mark Monmonier’s counter-argument, Arno Peters’s stated aim, the Boston Public Schools decision of 2017, and the full citation for Battersby and Montello’s 2009 study in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99(2), pp. 273–291.
• Google Maps Platform, “Map and Tile Coordinates” — the Maps JavaScript API’s use of Mercator and the ±85° cut‑off; and the EPSG registry entry for EPSG:3857, “WGS 84 / Pseudo‑Mercator” — its named users, its declared scope, and the remark that it is not a recognised geodetic system.

Every figure and quotation above was taken from the pages linked here on 9 September 2026, and each is attributed in the text to the body that issued it. The individual ballots are taken from the UN Digital Library’s voting record for A/RES/80/307, read on 9 September 2026; the votes of Ukraine and the United States are taken from the meeting record, because the ballot list as displayed ran out before reaching them. Barrot’s remarks were delivered in French and are quoted in the wire services’ English. Where this piece states an opinion, it says so.