On 4 September 2026 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution called Correct the Map. The vote was 164 in favour, one against, with six abstentions. It was brought by Togo on behalf of the African Group of fifty-four member states, together with the African Union.
The resolution encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use equal-area projections such as Equal Earth wherever the relative size of countries and continents matters.
It is worth being precise about what that is and is not. The resolution is not binding, and it does not make any single projection official. It names Equal Earth as the leading example of a class of projections, and asks institutions to reach for one of them when size is the point. That is a recommendation rather than a rule — but a recommendation with 164 countries behind it, which on a question of this kind is a great deal.
What was wrong with the old map
The map most people picture is the Mercator projection, published in 1569. It was built for navigation, and at that job it is brilliant: a course of constant compass bearing is a straight line on a Mercator sheet, which is exactly what a sixteenth-century pilot needed.
It buys that property by stretching. The further from the equator, the more the map inflates. At the latitude of Europe and North America the stretch is substantial. Near the poles it is extreme.
The result is the distortion the resolution is aimed at. On a Mercator map Greenland looks about the size of Africa. Greenland is roughly seven per cent of Africa's land area — Africa is about fourteen times larger.
What Equal Earth does instead
Equal Earth was created in 2018 by three cartographers: Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny and Tom Patterson. It is an equal-area projection, which means the relative area of any region is preserved everywhere on the sheet. Africa is drawn fourteen times the size of Greenland because that is what it is.
Equal-area projections are not new. What was new in 2018 was one that people actually wanted to hang on a wall. The mathematics builds on the Putniņš P4ʹ and Eckert IV projections. The look is deliberately modelled on the Robinson projection, which is handsome but does not preserve area — Equal Earth keeps the rounded sides and straight parallels that make Robinson pleasant to read, and fixes the thing Robinson gets wrong.
Told of the vote, Tom Patterson said: "Wow. When we created the Equal Earth projection in 2018, we never imagined this."
What it does not fix
Every flat map of a round Earth distorts something. That is not a flaw in a particular projection, it is a consequence of the geometry, and no vote changes it.
Equal Earth chooses to preserve area and pays for it in shape. Landmasses towards the left and right edges of the sheet are visibly stretched. It is also the wrong map for navigation: a compass bearing is not a straight line on it, which is the one thing Mercator was built to do.
The resolution's own wording reflects this. It asks for equal-area projections where relative size matters, and asks schools to teach that a flat map cannot represent a sphere without compromise somewhere. That is the honest position, and it is the one worth taking into a classroom.
The maps we publish on it
Map Studio has published African cartography since 1958, so a resolution brought by the African Union about how Africa is drawn is not an abstract matter here. Two sheets in our range use the Equal Earth projection, both at 1:30 300 000 on a 1 475 mm sheet:
- World Political Educational Wall Map (Equal Earth) — countries and independent states, dependencies, capitals and major cities, drawn at true relative area.
- World Physical Educational Wall Map (Equal Earth) — terrain, rivers, lakes, waterfalls and undersea features, on the same projection and the same scale.
Both are laminated, with or without battens. The rest of the range is in educational and world wall maps.
If you are replacing a classroom map
The resolution asks schools to do two things, and the second is easy to miss. The first is to use an equal-area projection where size matters. The second is to teach why flat maps distort at all.
A room with both maps on the wall does that better than a room with either one alone. If you already have a Mercator sheet up, the case for keeping it beside an Equal Earth sheet is stronger than the case for taking it down. The comparison is the lesson.