The Map Two People Made

On 4 September 2026 the UN General Assembly voted 164 to 1, with six abstentions, to encourage governments, schools and tech companies to use maps that show continents at their true relative size. The resolution, led by Togo for the African Union, points to one projection by name: Equal Earth.

Hours before the vote, France announced it was dropping Mercator too.

Gerardus Mercator drew his projection in 1569 to solve a sailor's problem: straight lines on it hold a constant compass bearing. Preserving direction cost area, so land stretches the further it sits from the equator.

The result is a schoolroom map where Greenland looks the size of Africa. Africa is about fourteen times larger.

The resolution bans nothing and replaces nothing. It is non-binding, and Mercator stays exactly where it is useful: maritime and aerial navigation, where it remains fully suited.

Togo's foreign minister said plainly that the effort was not meant to condemn Mercator. The argument was never that the old map was worthless. It was that a better one now existed.

Equal Earth was introduced in 2018 at a cartography conference in North America, the work of a handful of mapmakers including Bojan Savric and Bernie Jenny. It follows the curve of the planet and keeps areas honest: Europe shrinks a little, Brazil swells, Greenland comes back down to size.

No campaign. No committee. A design problem, solved properly, and released.

The people who carried Equal Earth into the General Assembly were other people entirely: the African Union, which adopted it in March; Togo, which led the negotiations; advocacy groups who spent years arguing the case in public.

The makers did not lobby. They built the alternative, and someone else picked it up and walked it into the room.

People had complained about Mercator for decades. Complaint alone moves nothing, because a country replacing its school atlases needs a specific thing to print instead.

The vote was possible because the answer to what else, then already existed, tested and free to use. The argument had somewhere to land.

After the vote, one of the map's makers said publicly that he had never imagined it would come to this. Eight years earlier the project was a technical paper and a formula.

That gap is the point. Between finishing good work and finding out what it became, there are usually years in which nothing visible happens at all.

Most useful work compounds out of your sight. You will rarely be in the room when it is used, and you will almost never be named there.

So the practical version is modest: make the thing well, make it easy for someone else to pick up, and let go of needing to see where it travels. Two mapmakers did that in 2018. The world redrew itself in 2026.