'Europe Shrinks, Africa Grows': The UN Vote That Could Change The World Map You Know

(MENAFN- Live Mint) The way the world has been shown for centuries could soon change, after the UN backed an African-led push for maps that reflect the continents' true relative sizes.

Africa's true size takes centre stage in UN vote on world maps

Africa will appear much larger. Europe and North America will no longer dominate the page in quite the same way. Greenland, perhaps the biggest victim of cartographic illusion, will finally look closer to what it actually is: a vast island, but nowhere near the size of an actual continent.

The change follows a United Nations General Assembly resolution backing greater use of map projections that represent the relative sizes of countries and continents more accurately. The African-led initiative, championed by Togo and supported by the African Union, was adopted with 164 countries voting in favour.

India backed the resolution. The United States was the only country to vote against it, while six countries abstained.

At the heart of the debate is a deceptively simple problem: Earth is round, but the maps most people grow up looking at are flat.

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Turning the surface of a sphere into a rectangle is mathematically impossible without distorting something. A mapmaker can preserve the shape of land masses, their relative area, distances or directions - not all of those qualities at once. Every flat world map is therefore a compromise

The Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, made one particular compromise. It was designed primarily for navigation, allowing sailors to plot straight-line compass courses. That made it enormously useful. It was never intended, however, to provide a faithful comparison of the size of continents.

The distortion becomes increasingly dramatic away from the Equator. On a Mercator map, Greenland can appear almost comparable in size to Africa. In reality, Africa is about 14 times larger. The projection similarly magnifies northern regions visually enlarging parts of Europe and North America while making equatorial land masses appear comparatively smaller than they really are.

Why was this change needed?

That is why the debate has moved far beyond geography. Togo 's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told the General Assembly that the persistence of such distortions had contributed to“symbolically minimising” Africa and creating an unbalanced understanding of global geography.

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The African Union has framed the campaign as an effort towards a fairer and more accurate representation of the continent and other regions

The resolution promotes alternatives such as the Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018. It is an equal-area map, meaning that the relative sizes of land masses are kept much closer to reality, even though some shapes must still be distorted to flatten a globe. Africa therefore looks enormous on such a map because, geographically, it is enormous.

Washington, however, rejected the resolution, arguing that it was tied to a broader ideological agenda and criticising references surrounding concepts including cognitive justice and reparations. Ukraine was among six countries to abstain, citing concerns over how certain Equal Earth maps depict Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.

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The UN resolution is not legally binding, and Mercator maps are unlikely to disappear from navigation. But the vote could influence the maps used in education, institutions and technology.

The planet itself has not changed. Its continents have not moved. Only the picture of them has. And for millions of people who have spent their lives learning geography from a distorted rectangle, that may prove to be a surprisingly consequential difference.

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