Metro Manila, Philippines – The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly backed an African-led proposal for a new world map that shows Africa closer to its true size relative to other parts of the world.
The proposal was adopted Friday with 164 countries voting in favor, one against and six abstaining.
The initiative seeks to address distortions created by commonly used world maps, particularly the Mercator projection, which makes land masses farther from the equator appear disproportionately large while shrinking the visual scale of Africa.
One of the clearest examples is the comparison between Africa and Greenland. On many familiar world maps, Greenland can appear almost as large as Africa, even though Africa is roughly 14 times bigger.
The African-led campaign argues that the distortion is not merely a cartographic issue, but has shaped how generations of people perceive Africa’s size and place in the world.
The proposal promotes the use of map projections that preserve the relative size of continents more accurately, allowing Africa’s vast geographic scale to be represented more proportionately.
The UN vote does not redraw borders or change geography. Instead, it gives overwhelming international backing to Africa’s push to change how the continent is represented on world maps.
With reports from UN News Center
