The cartographers who designed the more accurate map of the world to replace the inaccurate Mercator projection have joined forces with Togo to implement the UN resolution.
Following on from the historic vote in the UN, which passed a resolution to correct the ancient but inaccurate Mercator map and replace it with a different one, the three cartographers behind the Equal Earth projection – Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny and Bojan Šavrič – have agreed to provide their scientific and technical support for the implementation of the resolution.
This commitment was announced at the initiative of Professor Robert Dussey, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Togolese Republic, who championed this resolution before the UN General Assembly on behalf of the African Union.
The Minister thanked the three designers for a scientific work conceived in 2018 with no political purpose, which has since become the cartographic reference of a continental endeavour.
Discussions focused on the areas of cooperation that the implementation phase calls for: Scientific and technical support for states and institutions that adopt equal-area projections; the development of freely usable reference maps and the preparation of educational resources for African education systems.
Designed in the quest for a world map that respects the true land areas of the continents without distorting their outlines, the Equal Earth projection was published in August 2018 in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science .
The projection, used by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and integrated into Esri software, was chosen by the African Union as its institutional cartographic reference.
It constitutes the scientific foundation of the “Correct the Map” resolution, which encourages governments, schools, international organisations, the media and technology companies to use equal-area projections whenever the relative size of territories is at stake.
The participants agreed to continue discussions within a structured framework. In the coming weeks, Togo will present a concept note proposing the establishment of a scientific advisory group for the implementation of the resolution, on which the three designers have been invited to sit in their personal capacity.
“A fair map does not change geography: it changes the way we look at the world. Cognitive justice begins there, with the way children learn to situate their continent. The three scientists who designed Equal Earth have given Africa an instrument that we now intend to place at the service of our schools,” said Prof. Robert Dussey.
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Cartographers to work on amplifying new world map
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