Context: The United Nations General Assembly passed the Correct the Map resolution (164 votes in favor, 1 against, 6 abstentions), formally endorsing the adoption of the Equal Earth projection.
About Equal Earth Map:
What it is?
- The Equal Earth projection is an equal-area, pseudocylindrical world map projection created in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny.
- It was designed specifically to display the entire globe’s surface while preserving relative landmass sizes accurately without causing the severe, aesthetically jarring shape distortions common in earlier equal-area maps like the Gall-Peters projection.
Current Map Style (The Mercator Projection):
- Origins & Purpose: Formulated in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator specifically as a navigational tool for maritime sailors.
- Conformal Nature: It preserves local shapes, angles, and constant compass bearings (rhumb lines) as straight paths.
- Severe Area Distortion: To keep angles intact on a flat rectangular grid, latitude lines are stretched progressively wider toward the poles. Consequently, equatorial regions appear drastically shrunken, while high-latitude regions appear massive.
- For instance, Greenland appears roughly equal in size to Africa, even though Africa is actually 14 times larger.
Need for Change:
- Visual and Cognitive Bias: The perpetual dominance of Mercator in classrooms, textbooks, and media creates a psychological impression of northern-hemisphere dominance, minimizing the perceived economic and geopolitical weight of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.
- Misrepresentation of True Scale: On standard Mercator maps, the African continent’s true expanse—which can easily fit the US, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe within its borders—is drastically downplayed.
- Fixing Earlier Equal-Area Flaws: While the 1970s Gall-Peters map corrected area, it heavily distorted continental shapes. The Equal Earth projection was created to balance area accuracy with visually pleasing, recognizable landmass outlines.
Key Features of the Equal Earth Projection:
- True-to-Scale Surface Area (Equal-Area): Continents and nations are displayed in exact proportion to their true physical surface areas.
- Pleasing Continental Outlines: Inspired by the aesthetic curvature of the Robinson projection, it preserves familiar continental shapes and reduces extreme shearing at higher latitudes.
- Straight Parallels of Latitude: Parallels remain straight horizontal lines, making it easy to compare locations sharing the same latitude across the globe.
- Flexible Centering: Can be constructed with different central meridians, allowing regional variations such as Pacific- or Oceania-centered views instead of exclusively relying on the Greenwich prime meridian.
Significance:
- Addresses centuries of cartographic marginalization, restoring geographic dignity and fair representation to the Global South in international discourse.
- Provides school systems, universities, and public institutions with a realistic reference frame for global geography, natural resource distributions, and climate vulnerability.
