The UN Just Endorsed Equal Earth — Here's What Mercator Was Actually Doing to Africa

What happened

On Friday 4 September 2026 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution encouraging governments and institutions to adopt the Equal Earth projection in place of Mercator. It was sponsored by Togo and backed by the African Union; 164 member states voted in favour, the United States voted against, and six — Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine — abstained [Associated Press, 4 September 2026].

The resolution bans nothing. It encourages.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the interesting question is not political. It is: how wrong is the map you have been looking at, exactly? That is a measurable quantity, and nobody needs a vote to settle it.

So we measured it.

The measurement

We took the same country geometry our map renderer ships (world-50m, Natural Earth data at 1:50m), and the same projection library it uses (d3-geo). For each country we computed two things:

• its true area — the solid angle it subtends on the sphere, times the Earth's mean radius squared. No projection is involved, so no projection can distort it.
• its drawn area — the planar area of the polygon actually painted, with each projection fitted to one identical 1600×900 canvas.

The ratio of a country's share of drawn pixels to its share of real surface is its area error. A faithful map scores ×1.00 everywhere.

Africa against Greenland

	true area	drawn on Mercator	drawn on Equal Earth
Africa (55 countries)	29.99M km²	16,906 px²	64,542 px²
Greenland	2.15M km²	17,852 px²	4,638 px²
ratio	13.9×	0.9×	13.9×

Africa is thirteen point nine times the area of Greenland. On Mercator it is drawn smaller than Greenland. Not slightly smaller in a way you would have to squint at — the continent that holds 55 countries and 1.5 billion people occupies less of the page than one island.

Equal Earth returns 13.9×, which is not a coincidence or a tuning: it is what "equal-area" means.

Every country, same test

country	Mercator	Equal Earth
Greenland	×3.91	×1.00
Norway	×2.14	×1.00
Canada	×1.23	×1.00
Russia	×1.17	×1.00
Sweden	×1.16	×1.00
India	×0.28	×1.00
Nigeria	×0.25	×1.00
Brazil	×0.25	×1.00
DR Congo	×0.24	×1.00
Kenya	×0.24	×1.00
Indonesia	×0.24	×1.00

The pattern is not "Africa is unfairly treated" so much as latitude is the whole story. Everything far from the equator is inflated; everything near it is shrunk to roughly a quarter of its due. India, Brazil and Indonesia are hit exactly as hard as Nigeria and Kenya. Greenland is the famous example only because it is the most extreme, sitting at 60–83° north.

Equal Earth reads ×1.00 for all eleven, and would for any country you added. That is a property of the projection, not a result we selected.

Why Mercator does this

Mercator is conformal: it preserves angles. A compass bearing is a straight line on it, which is why Gerardus Mercator drew it in 1569 for sailors and why it is still the correct projection for marine navigation.

Preserving angles at every point costs you area. To keep the shape of a small region correct as you move away from the equator, the map must stretch east–west by a factor of sec(φ) — 1/cos of the latitude — and then stretch north–south by the same factor to keep angles intact. Area therefore scales as sec²(φ). At 60° that is 4×. At 75° it is about 15×. At the poles it is infinite, which is why no Mercator map has ever shown one.

There is no fix for this that keeps Mercator Mercator. Conformality and equal area are mathematically incompatible on a sphere: no projection can have both. Every map projection is a decision about which lie you can live with.

For navigation, area distortion is the right lie: you need the bearing, not the acreage. For a map in a classroom, a newsroom, or a data visualisation, it is the wrong one — nobody is steering by it, and everybody is reading relative importance off the page.

What Equal Earth is

Equal Earth was published in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. It is equal-area by construction, and its design goal was explicitly to be an equal-area projection people would actually use — earlier ones tend to be visually unpleasant enough that they get rejected. Gall–Peters, the equal-area projection most often proposed as the Mercator replacement, is faithful on area and stretches the tropics into vertical smears.

Equal Earth keeps continents recognisably shaped, has gently curved meridians and a horizontal equator, and does not fold the poles into a point. It is close in spirit to the Robinson projection — which is not equal-area — but with the area property made exact.

It is worth being precise about what it does not do. Equal Earth distorts shape, particularly near the edges, and it is useless for navigation. It is not "the accurate map". There is no accurate map. It is the projection that tells the truth about the specific thing most maps are used to communicate.

Using it

We added equalEarth to PinePaper's projection list the day the resolution passed. It was already documented in our MCP tool schema and had never actually been wired — an agent that asked for it silently received Natural Earth, which is a compromise projection and not equal-area. That is fixed.

// Equal Earth world map
await PinePaper.mapSystem.loadMap('world', {
  projection: 'equalEarth',
  styles: { fill: '#1e3a5f', stroke: '#0f172a', strokeWidth: 0.5 }
});

// Colour countries by a data value — now that the areas are honest, a
// choropleth reads correctly instead of over-weighting the north.
PinePaper.mapSystem.applyDataColors({
  Nigeria: 223, Ethiopia: 126, Egypt: 114, 'Dem. Rep. Congo': 102
}, { colorScale: ['#fff7ec', '#7f2704'] });

In the editor it is in the projection dropdown of the Map panel, second in the list, marked (equal-area).

Twenty-three projections are available in total, including Mercator — which stays, because if you are drawing a nautical chart it remains the correct tool.

Reproduce this

The measurements above are twenty lines. Nothing here needs to be taken on trust:

import * as topojson from 'topojson-client';
import * as d3 from 'd3-geo';

const fc = topojson.feature(topo, topo.objects.countries);
const R = 6371.0088;                                  // km, IUGG mean radius
const trueKm2 = (f) => d3.geoArea(f) * R * R;         // steradians → km², no projection

const W = 1600, H = 900;
const fit = (p) => p.fitSize([W, H], { type: 'Sphere' });
const merc = fit(d3.geoMercator());
const equal = fit(d3.geoEqualEarth());
const drawn = (f, p) => Math.abs(d3.geoPath(p).area(f));

// area error = share of drawn pixels ÷ share of true surface
const err = (f, p, worldDrawn, worldTrue) =>
  (drawn(f, p) / worldDrawn) / (trueKm2(f) / worldTrue);

Run it against any country set you like. The number that surprised us was not Greenland — that one is famous. It was that Africa and Greenland swap places entirely: a 13.9× ratio rendered as 0.9×, an error of more than fifteen-fold in the comparison a reader actually makes.

Sources

• Associated Press, "UN General Assembly endorses a new world map that shows more accurately Africa's size", 4 September 2026 — vote counts, sponsorship, and the text of the encouragement.
• Šavrič, B., Patterson, T., & Jenny, B. (2018). "The Equal Earth map projection." International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 33(3).
• Country geometry: Natural Earth 1:50m via world-atlas. Areas computed with d3-geo.