France’s Foreign Ministry will abandon the Mercator projection in official documents, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced Friday, co-sponsoring a United Nations resolution that calls on governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to adopt more accurate map projections.
The resolution, brought by Togo and the African Union, went to a vote at the UN General Assembly on Friday. It does not seek to ban the Mercator projection outright. Instead, it asks institutions to adopt the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps where the true scale of continents is relevant.
Speaking at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Barrot outlined the French Foreign Ministry’s commitment to “abandon the Mercator projection in favour of map representations tailored to specific uses, more faithful to actual surface areas and in line with the recommendations of cartographers and scientists.” He framed the shift as part of a broader conversation about how visual representations shape international perceptions of power and influence.
The Mercator projection, named after a 16th-century Flemish cartographer and originally designed for maritime navigation, introduces increasing distortion the further a region lies from the equator. Africa and South America, both straddling the equator, appear substantially smaller than their actual size, while Russia, North America and Greenland appear much larger. Barrot was direct about the scale of the problem. “Greenland appears almost as large as Africa, whereas Africa is actually about 14 times larger,” he said. “The United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual importance compared with Africa, Latin America or South-East Asia.”
Barrot argued that such distortions accumulate psychological weight over time. “Distortions eventually take root in perceptions. The time has come to correct them,” he said. “Changing the map obviously does not change the world. But correcting a distorting representation is already an act of truth.” He positioned the decision as consistent with France’s broader effort to counter oversimplified narratives that divide the world into a “global south” pitted against “the West.”
The French announcement reflects momentum built by an African-led campaign to reform how the world is mapped in official and educational contexts. Earlier in the week, Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey addressed the African Group at the UN on the significance of “correcting the map.” His argument was unambiguous: “A map is never neutral. It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood, and may, sometimes from the earliest years of schooling, perpetuate representations that do not correspond to geographic reality.”
Dussey was careful to frame the campaign not as a demand for preferential treatment but for accuracy. “Africa is asking that its reality, aspirations and contribution to the international system be duly taken into account,” he said. He urged African delegations to broaden support for the resolution before Friday’s vote, characterising it as a test of the continent’s collective voice within the organisation.
The African Union endorsed the campaign in August 2025 and tasked Togo with leading the push for adoption at the UN. Historians and geographers have long argued that the Mercator projection reflects Western assumptions about global geography, with some campaigners describing the practice as “cartographic colonialism.”
The resolution encourages international organisations and states to use alternative projections, including the Equal Earth projection developed by a team of cartographers in 2018. Unlike Mercator, equal-area maps preserve the relative sizes of different regions of the world. More information is available at https://www.rfi.fr/en/international/20260904-france-drops-mercator-maps-as-africa-pushes-for-truer-world-view.
Whether other major governments follow France’s lead, and how quickly institutions from ministries to textbook publishers move to update their materials, will determine whether Friday’s vote translates into lasting change in classrooms and official chambers around the world.