India votes in favour of UNGA resolution on new world map

Why in the News

India has voted in favour of a United Nations General Assembly resolution aimed at correcting the world map to promote a “more accurate representation” of continental landmasses. The 193-member Assembly adopted the resolution “Correct the map: rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world’s regions, particularly Africa”, which was sponsored by Togo. It encourages governments and institutions around the world to replace the traditional Mercator map with the Equal Earth projection, which “shows locations more accurately”. The resolution carried 164 votes in favour, with a lone vote against from the United States. The question the vote raises is whether a projection designed in the sixteenth century for navigation should continue to set how the world’s regions are seen.

What is a map projection, and what does the Mercator do to area?

1. The underlying problem: A projection is the rule for transferring a curved surface onto a flat sheet, and no flat map can preserve shape, area, distance and direction at the same time. Every projection therefore chooses which property to keep and which to sacrifice.
2. What the Mercator keeps: It preserves angles, so a line of constant compass bearing plots as a straight line. That property is what made it a navigator’s map.
3. What it sacrifices: Scale grows with distance from the equator, so landmasses near the poles are inflated and those near the equator are compressed. Eg. Greenland reads as roughly the size of Africa, though Africa is about 14 times larger.
4. What Equal Earth does instead: It is an equal-area projection, so every region occupies its true share of the map’s surface. The cost is a controlled distortion of shape rather than of size.

What did the Assembly actually adopt?

1. The instrument is a recommendation: The resolution encourages governments and institutions to switch projection. A General Assembly resolution of this kind carries no binding force on any member state.
2. The sponsor and the stated purpose: Togo sponsored the text, and its stated aim is the equitable representation of the world’s regions, and of Africa in particular.
3. The campaign behind it: It carries forward an African Union-backed campaign to limit use of the Mercator map on the ground that visual under-representation reinforces a perception of the continent as peripheral.
4. India’s vote: India voted in favour, placing it with the large majority rather than with the abstaining or dissenting group.

What does the voting pattern show?

1. The scale of support: 164 of the 193 members voted in favour, which is an overwhelming margin for a text with a contested premise.
2. The single dissent: The United States cast the lone vote against.
3. The abstentions: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine abstained.
4. What a wide margin does not settle: Adoption records agreement on a principle. It creates no obligation on any national mapping agency, publisher or platform to change what it prints.

Challenges to replacing the Mercator projection

1. No projection is politically neutral, and equal-area maps distort in their own way: Preserving area forces a distortion of shape, so a switch trades one visual misrepresentation for another. Eg. The Gall-Peters projection was promoted on the same equity argument in the 1970s and 1980s, and it stretched Africa vertically enough that seven North American geographic bodies passed a joint resolution in 1989 against rectangular projections of that kind.
   The Fix: Pair any recommendation with published guidance on which projection suits which purpose, so a navigation chart and a thematic world map are not held to one standard.
2. The digital map layer is locked into Mercator by design: Web mapping tiles use a Mercator variant because it keeps north upward and shapes locally correct at every zoom level, which is what makes seamless zooming possible. Eg. Web Mercator underlies the standard tile schemes of the major online mapping services.
   The Fix: Require default map interfaces to switch to an equal-area view at continental and global zoom levels, where the distortion is largest and the navigation property is not being used.
3. The change has to travel through textbooks and curricula, which move slowly: School atlases, examination material and classroom wall maps are procured on multi-year cycles, so a resolution adopted in one year reaches a classroom several later. Eg. Boston’s public school district switched its classroom maps to an equal-area projection in 2017, and the change stayed confined to that district.
   The Fix: Route the recommendation through national survey agencies and curriculum bodies, which specify the base maps that textbook publishers are obliged to reproduce.

Conclusion

The vote settles a question of principle that was never seriously contested and leaves the operative one untouched. What people actually see is set by the default projection of a handful of digital mapping services and by the atlases that education departments procure, and none of them is bound by this text. The measure of the resolution is therefore not the margin it passed by. It is whether a national mapping agency or a major platform changes its default in the year that follows.

Matching Previous Year Question

“With reference to the United Nations General Assembly, consider the following statements : 1. The UN General Assembly can grant observer status to the non-member States. 2. Inter-governmental organisations can seek observer status in the UN General Assembly. 3. Permanent Observers in the UN General Assembly can maintain missions at the UN headquarters. Which of the statements given above are correct ? (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3”