The economic, educational and political consequences of moving beyond Mercator
In the previous article, we looked at a deceptively simple question: How much larger does a country appear on a Mercator map than it really is?
The answer was surprisingly large.
Using Natural Earth country polygons and calculating the area distortion produced by Web Mercator, we found that India is represented at roughly 1.19 times its true spherical area. China is inflated by about 59%, the United States by about 129%, and Russia by about 390%. At the extreme end, Greenland is represented at more than 16 times its true area.
These numbers are not merely curiosities of cartography. They raise a much bigger question:
If the map we use to represent the world changes, does anything in the real world change with it?
The answer is both yes and no.
A new map will not change the size of Africa, alter India's borders, increase China's GDP or reduce Russia's territory. But maps influence how humans perceive space, how data are visualized, what children learn, and how institutions communicate geographical information.
And this question is no longer hypothetical.
On 4 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution encouraging the use of maps that represent the relative sizes of land masses more accurately, with the Equal Earth projection specifically promoted as an alternative to Mercator. The vote was 164 in favour, six abstentions and one against—the United States. The resolution is non-binding and does not prohibit Mercator.
So what could actually change?
First: the map does not change the territory
It is important to begin with the obvious.
Changing from Mercator to Equal Earth does not change:
the area of India;
the size of Africa;
national borders;
shipping routes;
property boundaries;
agricultural land;
mineral resources;
GDP;
population;
military strength;
or the physical geography of the planet.
The underlying geographical coordinates remain the same.
What changes is the mathematical transformation used to turn those coordinates into a flat image.
This distinction is crucial because much of the popular discussion surrounding the UN vote has made the change sound more dramatic than it actually is.
The United Nations has not "redrawn the world."
It has endorsed a different way of displaying the world.
The immediate economic impact: almost zero
Suppose every textbook, website and government map in the world switched from Mercator to Equal Earth tomorrow.
Would India's economy change?
No.
Would the price of land in Delhi change?
No.
Would shipping companies suddenly have to recalculate their routes?
No.
Would the GDP of an African country increase?
No.
There is therefore no credible mechanism through which changing the projection itself would produce an immediate change in national income, trade or economic output.
The first-order economic effect is instead likely to be a relatively mundane one:
Changing the software, maps and educational materials costs money.
Governments, publishers, universities, GIS departments, media organizations and technology companies have enormous collections of maps.
Changing a cartographic default can therefore involve:
redesigning maps;
updating textbooks;
changing GIS templates;
modifying websites;
regenerating figures in reports;
updating presentation templates;
revising educational graphics;
checking spatial-analysis workflows;
and retraining users.
But this transition is considerably easier than it might sound.
Equal Earth is not a theoretical proposal waiting to be implemented. It is already supported by modern geospatial software. The PROJ library, which underlies a huge amount of GIS software, supports Equal Earth as a global pseudocylindrical equal-area projection.
In other words, the technology already exists.
The difficult part is not inventing the projection.
It is changing the default.
The real battle is over defaults
This may be the most important point.
People rarely choose map projections consciously.
When someone opens Google Maps, an atlas, a textbook, a newspaper graphic or a GIS program, they generally don't ask:
"Which projection is mathematically optimal for this particular task?"
They simply use whatever the software, publisher or institution has chosen.
This gives defaults enormous power.
If a school textbook uses Mercator for decades, generations of students repeatedly see the same visual relationship between Europe, Africa, Greenland, India and North America.
If a news organization uses an equal-area projection, readers repeatedly see a different relationship.
Neither map changes reality.
But the visual baseline against which people compare reality changes.
That is why the UN resolution could matter despite having no legal force.
Education is likely to be the first major change
Education is probably where the transition will be most visible.
The UN resolution specifically encourages broader adoption in educational materials, media and digital platforms. Togo has already indicated that it intends to update its school geography materials by the end of 2026.
Imagine a child encountering a world map for the first time.
On a conventional Mercator map, Greenland can look enormous relative to Africa.
On an equal-area map, Africa immediately appears as the gigantic continent that it actually is.
That is not a trivial difference in visual experience.
Students are not memorizing square kilometres when they look at a map. They are building an intuitive mental model of the world.
Maps therefore function as a kind of spatial visual language.
Changing that language could gradually change people's intuition about:
continental size;
distances;
population distribution;
climate zones;
latitude;
the relative geographical scale of countries;
and the physical extent of regions.
Whether that ultimately changes political or economic attitudes is much harder to establish scientifically.
But the possibility is reasonable.
Could a map actually influence economic development?
Here we need to be much more careful.
It is tempting to argue:
"Africa has looked small for centuries, therefore people underestimated Africa, therefore changing the map will increase investment in Africa."
That is a much stronger claim than the evidence supports.
There is no good basis for saying that changing map projections will directly increase foreign investment, GDP or trade.
Economic decisions are influenced by hundreds of variables:
institutions;
infrastructure;
political stability;
human capital;
natural resources;
market size;
demographics;
taxation;
technology;
trade policy;
geography;
and many others.
A map projection is not going to override these factors.
But there is a subtler possibility.
Maps influence communication.
Imagine a presentation showing:
"Africa's land area is enormous."
If the accompanying map makes Africa visually smaller than North America or approximately comparable to Greenland, the numerical statement and visual impression are in conflict.
An equal-area projection removes much of that contradiction.
The map therefore becomes a better communication tool.
Over decades, better geographical visualization could influence education, scientific communication, journalism and public understanding.
That is plausible.
But it should not be confused with evidence that Equal Earth will somehow generate economic growth.
Where the change could have a much more concrete economic effect: spatial data
There is another consequence that is far less political and much more technical.
Map projections affect how we analyse spatial data.
This matters enormously for:
agriculture;
forestry;
biodiversity;
protected areas;
climate change;
land use;
carbon storage;
infrastructure;
urban expansion;
disease ecology;
natural resources;
and development planning.
Suppose a researcher wants to calculate the area of forest cover from a global raster dataset.
If the calculation is performed naively in a projection that severely distorts area, the resulting estimate can be biased.
The farther from the equator you go, the more problematic this becomes for Web Mercator.
This is not theoretical.
The World Bank, for example, has used Equal Earth in processing global spatial datasets and applied area corrections to account for projection effects.
Here the choice of projection can influence an actual number in a scientific or economic analysis.
And that number can subsequently enter:
a government report;
a conservation target;
a carbon estimate;
a development indicator;
an economic valuation;
or a policy decision.
This is where cartography stops being merely about how the world looks and becomes about how we measure the world.
But Equal Earth will not replace Mercator everywhere
This is another important misconception.
The UN resolution does not mean that Mercator is suddenly obsolete.
Mercator was designed for a very specific reason.
It is a conformal projection: it preserves local angles and shapes, making it extremely useful for navigation.
That is why Mercator became so important historically.
A sailor navigating across the Atlantic does not primarily need a map on which Greenland has the correct area.
They need a map on which certain angular relationships are preserved so that a constant compass bearing can be represented conveniently.
That is a completely different objective.
Equal Earth solves a different problem.
Equal Earth is an equal-area projection designed for world maps, preserving the relative areas of regions while providing a visually balanced global representation. It was developed in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny and is now implemented in major geospatial software.
So the future is unlikely to be:
Mercator → Equal Earth → Mercator disappears
It is much more likely to be:
Different projections for different purposes.
The likely future: a multi-projection world
We can imagine a rough division emerging.
| Application | Likely projection strategy |
|---|---|
| Maritime navigation | Mercator and related navigation projections |
| Web-based navigation | Web Mercator remains important |
| Global political maps | Equal Earth or another balanced projection |
| School geography | Equal-area projections increasingly common |
| Global thematic maps | Equal Earth and other equal-area projections |
| Local engineering/GIS | Projection chosen for the region and task |
| Property/cadastral mapping | Local appropriate projections |
| Aviation | Specialized projections depending on application |
| Scientific spatial analysis | Projection chosen according to the analysis |
This is actually a healthier way of thinking about cartography.
There is no universally "correct" flat map.
The Earth is three-dimensional.
Every world map involves some compromise.
The question is:
What property do you want the map to preserve?
Then what does the UN resolution actually accomplish?
Because the resolution is non-binding, it cannot order countries to stop using Mercator.
It cannot force Google, Apple or other technology companies to change their maps.
It cannot force the United States to adopt Equal Earth.
It cannot invalidate existing cartographic standards.
Instead, its power is largely normative.
It says, in effect:
When you make a general-purpose representation of the world, you should consider whether your projection gives people a misleading impression of relative geographical size.
That is a surprisingly powerful idea.
International standards often begin as recommendations rather than laws.
If enough governments, schools, publishers, scientific organizations and software companies adopt the recommendation, the recommendation can eventually become the new normal.
And this is where the United States matters
The most interesting political aspect of the vote is not that the United States voted against it.
It is that the United States can do so without preventing everyone else from proceeding.
The resolution received 164 votes in favour, six abstentions and one against—the United States.
Because the resolution is non-binding, Washington can simply continue using Mercator where it considers it appropriate.
And that is perfectly compatible with the resolution's broader purpose.
If France adopts a different world-map standard, if Togo changes its school textbooks, if African institutions adopt equal-area maps, and if GIS platforms make Equal Earth easier to select, none of those actions require American participation.
The interesting question therefore becomes one of network effects.
If most of the world begins using one projection for educational and thematic maps, eventually American institutions may find themselves using it simply because their international partners do.
This is how technical standards often spread.
Not through coercion.
Through convenience.
The software problem is more important than the political problem
There is a practical obstacle, however.
Modern digital mapping has been heavily built around Web Mercator.
Web Mercator became enormously successful because it works particularly well with tiled web maps: the entire planet can be divided into standardized square tiles that can be downloaded and displayed efficiently as users zoom and pan.
Replacing it globally is therefore not equivalent to changing the projection in a textbook.
It potentially means dealing with:
tile-generation systems;
cached map tiles;
APIs;
coordinate transformations;
rendering engines;
spatial databases;
legacy datasets;
browser libraries;
mobile applications;
and enormous amounts of existing geographic data.
This is why a complete replacement is unlikely.
Instead, we are more likely to see projection-aware systems.
A mapping platform might automatically use Web Mercator for interactive street navigation but Equal Earth when a user zooms out to a global thematic view.
That would be a much more technically sensible solution.
What happens to existing scientific datasets?
Fortunately, another important distinction helps here.
Changing the map projection does not require changing the underlying geographic data.
A point on Earth remains:
23.5° N, 77.6° E
regardless of whether it is displayed using Mercator, Equal Earth, Robinson or another projection.
The coordinates are transformed when the map is rendered.
This means that much of the transition can occur at the visualization layer.
A research institution does not necessarily have to rebuild its entire geographic database.
Instead, it can reproject the data when producing the map.
Modern GIS libraries are designed precisely for this purpose.
That makes the transition considerably more manageable.
The biggest change may be psychological
The most difficult effect to quantify is perhaps the most interesting.
Humans are extremely visual.
If we repeatedly see something represented as large, we tend to develop an intuition that it is large.
If we repeatedly see something represented as small, we tend to develop an intuition that it is small.
Mercator's distortion is systematic:
high latitudes become increasingly enlarged, while equatorial regions appear relatively compressed.
That means that the distortion is not random.
It consistently produces a particular visual relationship between different parts of the world.
An equal-area projection changes that relationship.
Africa suddenly occupies the enormous amount of map space corresponding to its enormous physical area.
South America becomes much larger relative to Europe.
India becomes somewhat larger relative to northern Eurasia.
Russia becomes substantially less gigantic.
Greenland loses its almost continent-sized appearance.
None of these changes are political statements.
They are mathematical consequences of representing area correctly.
But mathematics can have psychological consequences when it is presented visually.
There is an important irony here
The controversy surrounding Mercator is sometimes presented as though Mercator was deliberately designed to make Europe look powerful.
Historically, that is an oversimplification.
Mercator's projection was created in the sixteenth century primarily for navigation.
The extreme area distortion is a mathematical consequence of the projection's conformal properties.
The political interpretation came much later.
This distinction matters.
A map projection can have political consequences without having been politically designed.
That is a much more interesting lesson.
Why the choice of map should depend on the question
Imagine three different questions.
Question 1: Where should a ship sail?
Mercator can be extremely useful.
Question 2: Which countries contain the most forest?
An equal-area projection is much more appropriate for visual comparison.
Question 3: What does the world look like?
Now the answer is less obvious.
Perhaps Equal Earth.
Perhaps Robinson.
Perhaps Winkel Tripel.
Perhaps another compromise projection.
There is no mathematical theorem stating that one of these must be the universal world map.
The mistake is assuming that the same projection should be used for every problem.
What could change over the next five years?
The most realistic scenario is not a dramatic overnight replacement.
Instead, we may see a gradual cascade.
2026–2027: Education and institutional maps
Governments and educational organizations begin experimenting with Equal Earth and other equal-area projections.
Togo has already announced plans to update school materials.
2027–2030: Digital and media adoption
News organizations, publishers and international institutions increasingly use equal-area maps for global comparisons.
Mapping software makes these projections easier to use.
2030 onward: New default conventions
A new generation grows up seeing world maps that represent continental areas more faithfully.
Mercator remains available, particularly for navigation and applications where its properties are useful.
The important change is that Mercator stops being the automatic answer to the question "What should a world map look like?"
That would be a much more profound change than simply printing a different map in a textbook.
So will the world become richer because of Equal Earth?
Probably not.
At least, there is currently no evidence that we should expect a measurable GDP effect simply from changing projections.
But that does not make the change meaningless.
A more accurate distinction is:
Direct economic effect: very small.
Implementation cost: real but manageable.
Effect on education: potentially substantial.
Effect on scientific visualization: potentially important.
Effect on spatial analysis: sometimes quantitatively important.
Effect on public perception: plausible, but difficult to measure.
Effect on geopolitics: mainly symbolic and representational rather than material.
Effect on navigation: essentially none; Mercator remains useful.
Effect on cartographic standards: potentially significant.
The real revolution is not replacing Mercator
The most interesting outcome of the UN vote may therefore be something slightly different.
It may teach people that a map is not the Earth.
Every projection is a mathematical compromise.
Mercator preserves angles.
Equal Earth preserves area.
Other projections optimize other properties.
Once we understand that, the question stops being:
"Which map is correct?"
and becomes:
"Correct for what?"
That is a much more sophisticated way of looking at geography.
And perhaps that is the most useful consequence of the entire debate.
The future world map may not be one map at all.
It may be a world in which we routinely switch projections depending on the question we are asking—Mercator when navigation matters, Equal Earth when area matters, and other projections when shape, distance or visual balance matters.
The Earth has not changed.
Our mathematical representation of it has.
And sometimes, changing the way we represent reality is the first step toward understanding it more accurately.
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