The United Nations has passed a resolution endorsing the Equal Earth map projection, which conveys the sizes of the continents more accurately than the Mercator projection.
The UN resolution on endorsing the Equal Earth map projection was passed by 164 to 1 with six abstentions.
The sole dissenting vote was that of the United States, whose representative described the effort as being part of a “radical ideological project”.
This is despite the resolution not actually calling for the Mercator projection to be replaced. Rather, it “encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters, and to teach the limitations of any flat map in representing a spherical planet,” according to the UN news service.
The resolution had been put forward by the government of Togo, leading an initiative called Correct the Map of Africa on the Globe.
According to Togo and supporting nations, the standard Mercator map significantly distorts the size of the African continent, making it look smaller than it actually is in relation to other continents.
For instance, Mercator-projection maps often make Greenland look roughly the same size as the African continent, whereas in reality Africa is about 14 times larger.
“Maps shape our understanding of the world,” said Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign minister, in the lead up to the vote. “They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.”
Origin of the Equal Earth
The Equal Earth projection was developed by Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny (currently an academic at Monash University), and Tom Patterson in 2018.
According to the International Cartographic Association (ICA), “the Equal Earth projection is often a good choice for maps at the world scale because it preserves area while offering an aesthetically pleasing overall appearance (including moderately curved meridians and an approximately 2:1 aspect ratio). However, it distorts various other properties, such as angles or distances.”
“By contrast, the widely used Mercator projection (Fig. 2) is conformal (i.e., it preserves angles) and North is up at every point of the map but, while useful for field or sea navigation, it greatly enlarges areas toward the poles,” the ICA says. “For this reason, Mercator is generally a poor default choice for world maps intended to communicate relative area or to enable global comparisons.”
The ICA has issued a fact sheet outlining the pluses and minuses of various world map projections.
Responses from around the (now equal) globe
The ICA said it welcomes the “renewed global attention” the UN resolution has brought to map projections, as “the relative sizes of countries and continents matter”.
ICA President, Georg Gartner, said “the choice of projection should always be guided by the purpose of the map, its geographic extent and the properties that need to be preserved”.
“The current debate is therefore about more than replacing one projection with another. It is an opportunity to strengthen map literacy and awareness that maps are designed representations of our world — and that cartographic choices influence how we perceive it.”
Amy Griffin, Senior Lecturer in Geospatial Sciences at RMIT University, and a Vice President of the ICA, said the Mercator projection is a “not-so-excellent choice for making maps where the area of a country, state or other region is important to understanding the phenomenon being mapped”.
“Since we don’t usually need to navigate by ship with a compass anymore, we ought to usually be using other map projections for small scale maps of the world. But… whether any given equal area projection (e.g., Equal Earth, the sinusoidal projection, Goode’s homolosine or others) is a good choice depends on a number of factors, including what is being mapped and what the map is being used for,” she said.
For Kate Fairlie, a Land Administration Specialist with Land Equity International, the Mercator projection “has its time and place — it was designed for marine navigation where preserving direction is critical. So, it’s not ‘a bad projection’ — it’s simply designed for a different purpose (but arguably entrenches colonial heritage).”
Fairlie also points out that “the timing is significant: as the world reaches the 1.5°C global temperature threshold, we have to consider this discussion in the context of who bears the costs of a changing climate, and the historic legacies of slavery, colonialism and reparative justice”.
“And perhaps at the root of the motion is questioning the history of how things have been adopted, and what the future should look like,” she said.
“For Australia, which first nations spatial traditions can we recognise and adopt to be more inclusive, and better reflect our future?”
Previous attempt with the Gall-Peters projection
Griffin points out that this is not the first time an attempt has been made to move away from Mercator.
“More than fifty years ago, in 1973, a historian in Germany, Arno Peters, tried to get NGOs and other organisations to adopt what is now called the ‘Peters projection’ or, more accurately, the ‘Gall-Peters projection’ (acknowledging the actual first creator of that projection),” she said.
“That projection is another equal area projection that preserves areas (shows them in their true proportions relative to each other), but pretty substantially distorts the angles in the projection, so countries look rather compressed east-west,” she added.
“Ultimately, Peters was not successful in getting his projection adopted as a de facto standard… but the debate that his promotion of ‘his’ projection stirred up did call attention to the social implications of cartographic choices, and the social lives of maps are something worthy of more consideration in cartographic practice than they sometimes get.”
