164 Countries Voted to Redraw the World Map. The United States Cast the Only No.

The United Nations General Assembly voted Friday to endorse a world map that shows continents at their true relative size, adopting a resolution backed by 164 countries. The United States was the only member state to vote against it. Six countries — Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine — abstained.

The resolution names the Equal Earth projection as, in its words, a relevant option for improving the accuracy of the cartographic representation of the world. Equal Earth was published in 2018 by three cartographers: Bojan Savric of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Tom Patterson of the U.S. National Park Service and Bernhard Jenny of Monash University. It preserves the relative surface area of landmasses while keeping continental shapes close to how they look on a globe, a compromise that other equal-area projections handle less gracefully.

What it replaces, at least in principle, is the Mercator projection, drawn in 1569 for sailors. Mercator preserves compass bearings, which is why it survived for four and a half centuries, but it does so by stretching everything toward the poles. On a Mercator map Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size. Africa covers about 30.3 million square kilometers and is fourteen times larger. Europe, which Mercator inflates, covers about 10.2 million square kilometers.

The push came from African governments and the African Union's "Correct the Map" campaign, which has argued that a projection shrinking an entire continent in every classroom and newsroom in the world is not a neutral technical choice. The four regions the campaign identifies as systematically diminished — Africa, Latin America, Oceania and South Asia — together cover roughly 64 million square kilometers, more than 40 percent of the planet's land.

France co-sponsored the resolution. "Correcting a distorted representation is already an act of truth," Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said. The U.S. representative dismissed the exercise as a question of the institution's credibility rather than of geography, and Washington's vote left it isolated on a text that passed with the support of nearly the entire membership.

The resolution is non-binding and changes nothing by force. It does not require any government, publisher, textbook printer or software company to abandon Mercator, and web mapping services will keep using a Mercator variant because it preserves local angles at the zoom levels people actually navigate with. What a 164-to-1 vote does is give education ministries and cartographic agencies a citation to point at when they decide which map goes on the classroom wall — which is where most people acquire their mental picture of the world and then keep it for life.