Map projections are in the news (Sep 2026) after a UN resolution encouraging the use of equal area projections and discouraging the use of Mercator. The basic idea is fine, but the reporting & commentary around this has been getting some things wrong and while it wasn’t the main point of the story, I still felt the need to correct them.
- They overstate the prevalence of Mercator in general.
- They understate the prevalence of Mercator via Google Maps.
- They speak of Mercator like it was developed for the maritime navigation needs of the 16th century (true) and beyond ‘navigation’ there’s nothing intrinsically special about it (false). They ignore the real reason it’s used – you can zoom in for accurate local maps.
- False binaries.
- Lots of incorrect images shared, including by the UN.
That was the short version. Read on to see me describe these a bit more as well a few other points to ponder.
Long version
There are countless different map projections – ways to make a flat map of our round earth. If you look at a small part of the earth, it’s basically flat, but to make a map of the whole world, some parts will be stretched, things will end up as different sizes and shapes, depending which projection you use. The only world map without distortions is a globe.
The Mercator projection is the most commonly used one, for reasons I’ll explain soon. (I’m including Web Mercator here – it’s basically the same as original Mercator). It has the problem of making places further from the equator appear larger. Compared to the equator, places at 30° are 1⅓x the area, at 45° they are 2x, at 60° 4x, at 75° 14.9x, so Greenland (60-83°N) appears about the same size as Africa (37°N-35°S) despite Africa being 14x Greenland’s area.
This issue is sometimes described with a global justice angle: Most rich countries are well north of the equator, so have their sizes inflated, while most poor countries are nearer the equator. People regularly seeing a map with Europe/Russia and North America inflated relative to Africa and South America may think of the former continents as more significant than they might if they saw their actual relative sizes. This was taken up in The West Wing in 2001, where people lobby the US government to change to using equal-area world maps in education for this reason. Fans of the show are amused that something like it has happened in real life with the UN resolution 25 years later.
The five errors in more detail
Firstly, some of the commentary has implied that much of the world has only been using Mercator maps. This is not true; books with world maps usually use a more suitable one. From my vague memory the maps displayed at school were of various projections. “Finally seeing Africa’s true size”, as if there hadn’t been equal area projections on classroom walls for decades. Materials used in education and media around the world will have varied a lot, but I think people’s mental picture of a large Greenland came from a combination of Mercator and compromise projections that still inflate Greenland a bit.
Secondly, the big one – a misrepresentation that often goes unchallenged, even in the UN resolution itself. As an ABC article said “… the traditional Mercator projection, which was designed for maritime navigation by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569”. They make it sound like it was developed according to the needs of the seafaring Europeans long ago and became entrenched like the Qwerty keyboard, despite there being nothing special about it.
While navigation was a key issue in the 16th-18th centuries, that misses the point of what the projection is and why it’s used more than any other. Zoom in on any point of a Mercator map and you have a non-distorted north-up local map. Other projections don’t do that. The Mercator projection is a bad map of the whole world that contains very good local maps of every small non-polar part of the world. That’s why it’s used so often. That large map on the classroom wall does poorly at illustrating the whole world, but every small country is shown with its correct shape. (For this reason, while only a fraction of the printed maps a student would see were Mercator, those would often be large ones). And in the 21st century, web mapping systems like Google Maps use (Web) Mercator so you can zoom seamlessly. That poorly proportioned world map is the contents page of an atlas and street directory.
Thirdly, the issue was presented by some as a binary – this map versus that map, ignoring the existence of the many other projections in common use that are some kind of compromise between preserving area and preserving shapes (or other equal-area projections).
Fourthly, there were so many posts around the internet that purported to show one or both projections and got things wrong in so many ways. In some cases content creators using AI tools and not bothering to check for mistakes. In some cases deliberate untruths. There was one that I criticised on Facebook and the person who posted it said it was among materials provided by the UN!
Finally, much of the commentary missing the point that people are exposed to Mercator not because it has any special place in education but because of convenient web services like Google Maps (which is primarily for local maps). In the old days the maps people saw were typically produced by people who knew what they were doing (and usually used an appropriate projection for world maps). But now it’s easier to make a map and people will use whatever is easiest.
Others pointed out other errors, including the suggestion that the UN had adopted Equal Earth as its official map, when the resolution encouraged the use of equal area projections (giving Equal Earth as an example).
I guess the Mercator projection has been misrepresenting the sizes of continents for centuries, so media misrepresenting it may be somewhat fitting.
Questions to ponder
Compromise projections still distort areas, just not ridiculously so. Does a fair view of the world need to go all the way to equal area, or is one of the compromises adequate?
Would the Mercator projection have been used as much in earlier years if it made Europe look smaller?
During the Cold War, did westerners fear the USSR more because they were so big on the map?
If we object to an unequal area map because it makes some countries more prominent than their real area warrants, are we assuming that countries should be prominent if they’re large in area? Maybe cartographic equality calls for more area cartograms.
Perhaps Europe’s very high population density excused a map that inflates Europe. Perhaps the Europe’s smaller share of world population now is a reason to inflate Europe less.
Would this complaint have been avoided if the maps were chopped off at 70°N? This keeps most of Greenland’s real area but excises most of its false area.
Would countries be more unhappy about being represented smaller but the correct shape and central, or larger but distorted?
Other thoughts on cartography
Which projection is best depends on what kind of map. I’m not an expert so you’ll find much better advice elsewhere (USGS info poster), but here’s my mine. For local maps, Mercator works fine and no one will be thinking about projections. For a large country, you want one that’s as though you’re looking directly at that part of the globe. I’ve used Albers for maps of Australia.
When it comes to the whole world (or a majority of it), that’s where there will be tradeoffs. You’ll have distortion of one sort or another. If it’s a map of land use or average temperature, area is worth preserving – go with an equal area projection. If it’s a map of airline routes, you want to preserve distances as much as possible. The projection you choose depends on what you’re happy to go without. Do you need north up (or sort-of-up)? Do you need Antarctica? Could you sacrifice continuity in the ocean to reduce distortion in continents? Which part of the world will you cut through? Which are OK to get stretched?
Writing this makes me ask who is making maps and needs advice on doing it better?
That leads to other questions: Who has been getting the wrong impression of the relative sizes of continents, and to what extent? Which maps are to blame?
The people behind the Correct The Map argued that “we have accepted a map that makes Africa appear smaller”, but was that about maps in circulation in Africa, or Europe or elsewhere, or online? I think they overstate the use of Mercator (apart from web maps). The overall mix of projections in use has some effect to distort mental pictures around the world, but are the advocates misled about what maps are in circulation, or is Mercator more prevalent in some places than in Australia?
While the educational world and published/printed world maps typically do use appropriate projections much of the time and are not in such need of correction, the reason we are still seeing Mercator a lot is web mapping tools. Google Maps and the like are mostly used at local levels but we see the distorted world map between zooming out of one country and zooming into another. Aside from the basic map people use all the time, systems like Google Maps also allow people to make custom maps that previously might have been done in a traditional GIS by someone skilled with it.
The best way the world can “correct the map” is to make it easier for web mapping systems to use a different projection while zoomed out and revert to Mercator when they’re zoomed in far enough. I was thinking about the maths of how that might work, with Gall-Peters when zoomed out, but each zoom level adjusting so that it remained equal area. Then I found this excellent demo by Ben Joffe which does things like this with several projections.
The other even more recent development is people using AI tools to do their work for them, and this lowers the bar even further. Some people can instruct an AI tool make a map (or anything else) and not know enough to recognise its errors. I have never seen so many faulty maps made by AI as in the last few weeks.