Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 4 – The UN General Assembly has voted 164 to one against with six abstentions to urge all countries to stop using world maps based on the Mercator projection which has long been the international standard with the Equal Earth map which better shows the relative size of the countries and the regions of the world.
As advocates of the change have pointed out, the Mercator projection shows Greenland as larger than South America and about the same size as Africa, whereas in fact, Africa is more than a dozen times larger than Greenland, a Danish island which is about the same size as the Democrative Republic of the Congo alone.
Equally important for the backers of this change is the fact that the new map puts Oceania in the middle while the Mercator projection has the United Kingdom and by extension Europe at the center, a reflection of a geopolitics and population size that is increasingly at odds with reality.
The US was the only country to vote against this African proposal, an action that has sparked much discussion and criticism; but the abstentions by Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and Serbia have not, even though in each case, this vote represented a principled position.
Ukraine’s action, backed by Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova, is especially important. Kyiv objects to how the new map portrays Crimea. Instead of showing the peninsula as part of Ukraine, it portrays it in a different color from the one used for Ukraine -- but also different from the one used for Russia (https://echofm.online/news/na-novoj-karte-mira-oon-krym-otdelyon-ot-ukrainy).
Unlike the United States, Ukraine and its supporters did not vote against the change in maps but used their right to abstain to protest about one aspect of the map few others apparently see as important overall but that is critically important to countries like Ukraine who face a Russia prepared to challenge existing international borders by force.
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