The United Nations General Assembly has backed a resolution calling for greater use of a world map that represents the relative size of Africa more accurately than the widely used Mercator projection.

During a meeting at UN headquarters in New York, member states supported replacing the centuries old Mercator projection with the Equal Earth map, a design developed in 2018 that provides a more balanced representation of the areas of different continents.

A total of 164 countries supported the resolution. The United States was the only country to vote against it, with its representative describing the measure as unnecessary. Six countries chose not to take a position and abstained.

The resolution does not legally require governments, schools or organisations to abandon the Mercator projection. UN resolutions of this type are not legally binding. However, the decision could encourage changes to educational materials and digital mapping systems, particularly because the Mercator design remains common in classrooms, technology and government use.

Togo led the campaign for the resolution with support from the African Union. The country argued that the way continents are portrayed on maps can influence how people understand their relative importance and size. It said the long use of the Mercator projection has affected perceptions of Africa and other parts of the world in educational, cultural, political and economic contexts.

Before the vote, Togo’s Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Dussey said the matter should be viewed primarily as a scientific issue. He argued that established scientific evidence supports a more accurate representation of geographical size.

The Mercator projection was created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was originally designed to assist sailors with navigation and became widely adopted because of its usefulness for plotting routes across the oceans.

However, the projection significantly distorts the apparent size of land areas as they move farther from the equator. Regions at higher latitudes appear much larger than their actual size, while areas closer to the equator can look considerably smaller.

Africa provides one of the clearest examples of this distortion. On a Mercator map, Africa can appear comparable in size to Greenland, despite Africa being approximately 14 times larger than the Danish territory.