France will stop using maps based on the traditional Mercator projection, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced on Friday – backing an African push for a more accurate representation of the continent.
The announcement comes as the United Nations General Assembly votes on Friday on a resolution calling for the world to move away from Mercator maps in favour of projections that more accurately reflect the true sizes of countries.
France is co-sponsoring the resolution, which was brought by Togo and the African Union.
The text does not seek to ban the Mercator projection outright. It asks governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to adopt the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps where the true scale of continents matters.
Changing perceptions
The French Foreign Ministry "will 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," Barrot said in a speech at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
He said the decision was part of a wider debate about how maps and other representations shape perceptions of international power.
The Mercator projection, named after a 16th-century Flemish cartographer, is used around the world. Designed for maritime navigation, it increases distortion the further a region lies from the equator.
Since Africa and South America both straddle the equator, they appear smaller than their actual size, while Russia, North America and Greenland appear much larger.
"The United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual importance compared with Africa, Latin America or South-East Asia," Barrot said.
"Greenland appears almost as large as Africa, whereas Africa is actually about 14 times larger."
Such representations can have a lasting effect on how people perceive the world, he argued.
"Distortions eventually take root in perceptions. The time has come to correct them," Barrot said. "Changing the map obviously does not change the world. But correcting a distorting representation is already an act of truth."
Barrot said the move was in line with France's push against over-simplified views of the world that pit a so-called "global south" against "the West" and portray Europe as being in decline.
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African campaign
The French decision follows a campaign led by African countries to change the maps used around the world.
In a briefing to the African Group at the UN earlier this week on the importance of "correcting the map", Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said: "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."
"Africa is not asking for preferential treatment," he argued. "Africa is asking that its reality, aspirations and contribution to the international system be duly taken into account."
He urged African delegations to broaden support for the resolution before Friday's vote, describing it as a test of the continent's ability to act with one voice at the UN.
The African Union endorsed the campaign in August 2025 and asked Togo to lead the push for its adoption at the UN.
Historians and geographers have long argued that Mercator reflects Western assumptions about the world, with some campaigners denouncing what they describe as "cartographic colonialism".
The text submitted to the UN encourages international organisations and states to use other map projections, including the Equal Earth projection launched by a team of cartographers in 2018, to represent the continents.
Unlike Mercator, equal-area maps preserve the relative sizes of different parts of the world.
(with newswires)
