NAIROBI,Kenya, Sep 5— The United States was the lone country to reject an African-led campaign to change how the world is depicted on maps, as 164 countries backed a United Nations resolution promoting more geographically accurate projections.

📻 Breaking It Down

The vote at the UN General Assembly on Friday put Washington at odds with the overwhelming majority of member states, with six countries — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — abstaining.

The non-binding resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by African Union member states, encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use equal-area projections such as the Equal Earth map when the relative size of landmasses matters.

The resolution does not outlaw the centuries-old Mercator projection or require countries to abandon it.

📌 What You Need to Know

Instead, it calls for greater use of maps that preserve the relative area of continents and for greater public awareness of the limitations of representing the spherical Earth on a flat surface.

The US rejection, however, injected a political dimension into an initiative that African states have framed as an effort to correct longstanding distortions in the visual representation of the world.

Speaking before the vote, the US representative dismissed the proposal as part of what Washington described as a wider ideological campaign.

“The United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to,” the US representative told the General Assembly. Washington argued that the UN should concentrate on more pressing global challenges rather than what it regarded as symbolic debates over historical cartography.

“Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and cognitive justice,” the US representative said.

The US representative further described such resolutions as “barnacles on our work here” and argued that they were contributing to the UN’s declining credibility.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya