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Togo has announced plans to change its school geography materials by the end of the year after the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution promoting maps that more accurately represent the size of Africa and other regions of the world.
The resolution, sponsored by Togo on behalf of the African Group, was adopted on Friday with 164 countries voting in favour, while the United States voted against and six countries abstained.
It promotes the Equal Earth projection as an alternative to the widely used Mercator projection, which makes regions closer to the poles appear disproportionately large and Africa appear smaller relative to its actual size.
Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said his country would become the first to change its geography books as part of efforts to encourage wider adoption of the Equal Earth projection.
“Togo will be the first country to change our own geography books,” Dussey told Reuters.
“In the classroom, we need to change it to give an example to all the countries in the world.”
The Mercator projection was developed in the 16th century primarily for navigation. Because it preserves directions, it became widely used, but it distorts the relative size of land masses, particularly those farther from the Equator.
Africa, for example, is about 14 times larger than Greenland, although the two can appear roughly similar in size on a Mercator map.
The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018, preserves the relative surface areas of continents and, as much as possible, shows their shapes as they appear on a globe.
The United States was the only country to vote against the resolution, describing the initiative as an ideological exercise and questioning the decision to devote UN attention to the issue.
US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz said the initiative “cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to”.
The resolution is not legally binding and does not require countries to abandon the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains suited.
