The African Union won a global battle by getting the UN to approve a resolution to change the map of the planet.
The UN General Assembly voted, on Friday (4), in favor of replacing the traditional world map with one that more accurately reflects the size of Africa, a continent that is usually portrayed as less important in cartography.
On the new map, called Equal Earth, Brazil also appears proportionally larger than in the previous projection, known as Mercator.
On Mercator, Brazil appears to be similar in size to Alaska, although the country is five times larger than the American state. On Equal Earth, Brazil is much larger than Alaska.
African campaign
The organization that brings together all African countries joined a campaign a year ago to stop using the Mercator projection on world maps.
The campaign, called Correct The Map, seeks to prevent governments, organizations, schools and companies from representing the African continent on their maps as being smaller than it really is.
"It may look like just a map, but it really isn't," the vice-president of the African Union Commission, Selma Malika Haddadi, told Reuters at the time.
The Mercator projection, created in the 16th century by European cartographer Gerardus Mercator, shows territories closer to the poles — such as North America and Europe — as being larger than those located close to the Equator, such as Africa and South America.
This was the solution that Mercator found to a mathematical problem: representing a spherical planet on a flat surface.
In this projection, Brazil —which is crossed by the Equator— appears to be similar in size to much smaller territories, but which are close to the poles.
The Correct The Map campaign promotes the adoption of a projection known as Equal Earth, which more accurately reflects the size of territories, reducing these distortions.
World maps that follow the Mercator projection are those used as standard by applications such as Google Maps and are possibly those that have most shaped our mental image of the planet.
“For more than 450 years, we have based our understanding of Africa and the world on a map that is flawed,” states the Correct The Map website.
The movement argues that the distortion in the size of continents on the map is a matter of "power and perception".
The executive director of Africa No Filter, one of the organizations behind the campaign, called Mercator's projection "the biggest disinformation campaign."
A mathematical problem
It is mathematically impossible to accurately project a curved surface, like the Earth, onto a flat surface, like a sheet of paper or a screen.
Therefore, all flat representations of the Earth's surface necessarily present distortions. Depending on the technique used to create them, the size, shape and location of the continents vary.
Cartographers have been aware of this problem for centuries and have solved it according to the intended purpose of the map.
Mercator created his famous projection - which became the most popular in history - thinking about a specific need: navigation.
Thanks to it, a navigator using his world map could know which direction to go, based on the compass, to get from one point to another.
The problem with the Mercator projection is that it exaggerates the size of countries as they move away from the equator.
This is because it is a cylindrical projection, which presents the meridians as parallel and equidistant lines.
In reality, however, the meridians converge at the poles; that is, the distance between them decreases as they move away from the Equator.
The characteristic distortion of the Mercator projection makes, for example, Greenland and Africa appear to be similar in size, when, in fact, the African continent is about 14 times larger. Brazil, which in the Mercator projection appears smaller than Greenland, is in reality 3.9 times larger than Danish territory.
'A fair world begins with a fair map'
The resolution approved by the UN General Assembly was sponsored by Togo and supported by the African Union.
It received the support of 164 nations, the United States voting against it and the abstention of six countries: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine.
The UN resolution does not oblige any country to adopt the new map.
Before Friday's vote, Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey told Reuters that "a fair world begins with a fair map."
"A map is never neutral. It shapes perceptions and influences how we understand the place of people and continents in the world," he previously told a UN briefing.
Dussey had the support of French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, who stated that the French body would no longer use the Mercator map.
"Changing the map obviously doesn't change the world. But correcting a representation that distorts it is an act of truth," he said.
