A New UN Perspective on the Image of the World Map

The Mercator projection, developed in 1569 by Dutch cartographer Gerardus Mercator, became the focus of the discussion. Its creation was driven by the needs of maritime navigation. The projection’s main feature is that it preserves angles between directions, so routes following a constant compass bearing appear as straight lines. This made practical navigation significantly easier and ensured the projection’s widespread use in navigation for centuries. Angles are preserved at the expense of area. As distance from the equatorial region increases, the map scale grows, making territories at high latitudes appear larger.

The best-known example is a comparison of Greenland and Africa: on a Mercator map, they appear similar in area, even though the African continent is in fact much larger than Greenland. In addition, the projection cannot represent the polar regions accurately, because distortion increases toward the poles.

These characteristics are not a shortcoming of the Mercator projection alone. The problem stems from the fundamental limitations of cartography. Transferring the Earth’s spherical surface onto a plane inevitably causes geometric distortion. Different cartographic projections therefore aim to preserve particular properties: area, angles, distances, or directions. It is impossible to preserve all of these at once, which is why so many alternative ways of representing the Earth’s surface exist.

The adopted resolution recommends expanding the use of equal-area projections, with particular attention to the Equal Earth projection. It was developed to represent the areas of continents and countries more accurately while keeping distortion of their shapes moderate. Such projections are considered useful when accurate visual comparisons of the sizes of different territories are needed. However, the document does not propose abandoning the Mercator projection or establish a universal standard for depicting the Earth.

Despite decades of criticism, the Mercator projection remains practically useful. In the digital era, a modified version known as Web Mercator (sometimes called “spherical Mercator”—the de facto standard for digital cartography on the Internet) has become the basis for most online mapping platforms. This system makes it possible to divide a map efficiently into individual tiles and display data more quickly as the zoom level changes. The UN’s decision should therefore be viewed not as replacing one map with another, but as a call to use different cartographic tools in line with specific scientific, educational, and practical objectives.

Author: Candidate of Economic Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of World Economy and International Finance, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Alexey Alexeyevich Soluyanov.