Ok my last word on this as football will soon start and I need to hatewatch Newcastle.
I went through the website of the map people (hereafter, "The Mappets") to check some of the claims they make - correctthemap.org/
The key point here is not that they hold some wacky or dodgy ideas (I hold some crazy ideas myself) but that they have got this argument through a big vote at the United Nations. So it is a useful gauge of where the UN is right now, how rigorously arguments are made there and how seriously anyone should take these vites.
These are just some of the most eyebrow raising points I found.
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The biggest red flag is that on their resources page, they link to this article from the Kiel Institute (africamonitor.kielinstitut.d…) and say it considers "the implications of misrepresenting the continent's size"
You can click the link above to check the article for yourself: it does NOT say any such thing. It discusses productivity, capital, labour, governance and institutions. It does not discuss Mercator, map projections or whatever consequences of misrepresenting Africa’s geographical size.
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Right on their homepage, The Mappetts say of Mercator: "For over 450 years, we have based our understanding of Africa, and the world, on a map that is wrong!"
They repeat this claim in the FAQs where they call it the predominant global map. This is funny because right in the introduction of the original paper that created Equal Earth, the authors explicitly reject this claim about Mercator (researchgate.net/publication…)
What they do is distinguish its dominance in web mapping from its much weaker position in general-purpose printed world maps and atlases.
Sep 5, 2026 · 11:31 AM UTC
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In FAQ 8 on their website, they make this crazy claim that investors may underestimate Africa’s economic potential because its map representation makes it seem less significant.
You will note that they do not link to any evidence for this for the simple reason that there isn't.
I will challenge them to produce just one paper that backs up this claim
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In FAQ 6, The Mappetts say that the way to test a map is whether or not it centres Africa. How on earth does being at the centre determine whether or not a continent is accurately represented?
To show ridiculous this is, even Equal Earth produce 3 different versions of their wall maps - one centred on Greenwich, another on the Americas, and another on East Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Again, you can check and read up on this for yourself here (esri.com/about/newsroom/arcu…)
Calling other maps misleading because they don't centre Africa is just preposterous
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Back to their resources page, they link to an article by Rabah Arezki (theforum.erf.org.eg/2022/08/…) that claims the Mercator projection contributed to the Scramble for Africa and made the continent look “small and conquerable”. Heh?
I'm genuinely dumbfounded by this claim. The causal claim here is that colonial powers used maps therefore maps innit?
I wont even waste time on this one and just ask them a simple question - Which historical documents show decision-makers underestimating Africa’s scale because of Mercator, and acting differently because of that mistake?
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There are a few other dubious points. They just jump from geographical size to economic significance as if the line is a straight one. But greater distances also cause transport and service delivery headaches to name just one.
And honestly - why should a society need more square kilometres to deserve greater respect? Like what is the logic behind this claim? I cannot understand it.
ANother point you may have noticed in my screenshot of FAQ 8 above is that they say an incorrect map can make "Africa look farther than it is from other continents." Again, from where to where? Meanwhile the Equal Earth map they are touting does NOT preserve distances! It preserves areas and says explicitly that it distorts distances (doc.esri.com/en/arcgis-pro/l…)
So are these guys recommending a map that explicitly says it distorts distances to correct distances? I'm so confused.
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