The UN General Assembly is due to vote on Friday on a resolution urging countries, schools, international bodies and technology firms to move away from the widely used Mercator map projection in favour of the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately depicts the true relative size of countries and continents. The Mercator map distorts scale the further a region lies from the equator, making Africa and other equatorial areas look smaller while inflating the apparent size of Europe, North America, Greenland and Russia; campaigners argue this has shaped skewed perceptions of Africa's global standing. The resolution would not ban the Mercator projection but seeks to establish equal-area maps as the new global norm where accurate scale matters.

The proposal was brought by Togo with African Union backing, led by Togo's foreign minister Robert Dussey, who has called the current map "never neutral" and pushed African delegations to unite behind it. A striking example cited is Greenland, which appears similar in size to Africa on Mercator maps despite Africa being roughly 14 times larger; the #CorrectTheMap petition has gathered around 11,000 signatures ahead of the vote. The Equal Earth projection was developed by cartographers in 2018, building on decades of criticism of Mercator, including German historian Arno Peters' 1973 alternative, and Dussey has linked the campaign to a March UN resolution condemning the transatlantic slave trade.