What Different World Maps Get Right — and What They Get Wrong

The United Nations has just called for the world's predominant map to be replaced with one that more accurately reflects the true size of continents like Africa. The 'Correct the Map' resolution, adopted by the General Assembly, aims to fix a centuries-old distortion — and it's prompted renewed debate about the trade-offs built into every flat map.

The Mercator map: a navigational masterpiece with a size problem

The Mercator projection, created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, was designed to help European sailors navigate the oceans. Its genius lies in keeping compass bearings straight: a straight line drawn on the map looks like a straight line in reality if you follow a compass bearing.

To do this on a flat surface, Mercator had to stretch the grid lines wider as they moved toward the poles, making countries near the equator appear smaller than they are, while polar regions look enormous. The result is that Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa on many Mercator-based maps — even though Africa is about 14 times larger in reality.

Professor James Cheshire at University College London told the BBC: 'He wanted a straight line to be drawn on a map to look like a straight line in reality if you followed a compass bearing. That was what it was intended to do, and that's what it does brilliantly well.' More than 450 years later, Mercator's creation remains the basis for Google Maps and many classroom and broadcast maps worldwide.

The Equal Earth map: area accuracy at the cost of navigation

The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by a team of cartographers, was the map adopted by 54 African Union members before the UN's 164-nation vote. It aims to represent the size and shape of landmasses more accurately — correcting the Greenland-Africa disparity that critics say has subconsciously shaped perceptions of Africa's importance, resources and investment opportunities.

Kenyan geographer Kioko Muendo told the BBC: 'Maps are more than just guides for travellers — they shape how regions are perceived politically and economically.' However, the Equal Earth map sacrifices the straight compass-bearing lines that made Mercator invaluable for navigation. It also cannot be used for measuring true distances between places.

Professor Cheshire explained the fundamental limit: 'You can preserve area, or you can preserve shape, or you can preserve distance and direction, but not everything at once perfectly, because otherwise you'd be back to a sphere.'

The Peters map: an earlier attempt

The Peters projection, designed by German historian Arno Peters in the early 1970s and based on Scottish cartographer James Gall's 1855 work, took a different approach. It preserves area accuracy — fixing the Greenland-Africa problem — while keeping straight lines of longitude and latitude. The trade-off is severe shape distortion: polar regions look squished and equatorial regions appear stretched, making all landmasses look slightly off.

Like the Equal Earth map, the straight lines on the Peters projection do not represent true constant compass bearings, making it useless for navigation. Critics have long pointed out the awkward proportions it produces.

The inescapable trade-off

Every flat map of the globe involves compromise because it is physically impossible to perfectly represent the curved surface of a sphere on a flat rectangle. The choice is always between accuracy of area, shape, distance, or direction — and no single projection can maximise all four simultaneously. The UN's vote acknowledges that the choice of which distortion to accept is never politically neutral.