Uganda backs AU ‘Correct the Map’ initiative
Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny and Bojan Šavrič have agreed to provide scientific and technical support to Togo and the African Union in implementing the resolution, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 4 with 164 votes.
The Equal Earth projection was developed in 2018 to create a world map that preserves the relative areas of continents while limiting distortion of their shapes.
UNITED NATIONS - Uganda has joined 163 other countries in backing a United Nations resolution seeking to correct the distorted representation of the relative size of continents and countries on the world map.
The resolution, titled “Correct the Map”, is now being supported by the African Union with scientific and technical input from the three cartographers who developed the Equal Earth map projection.
Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny and Bojan Šavrič have agreed to provide scientific and technical support to Togo and the African Union in implementing the resolution, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 4 with 164 votes.
According to a press release shared by the Foreign Affairs ministry in Kampala on Thursday, the commitment followed a virtual meeting on September 20 with Togo’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Prof. Robert Dussey, who championed the resolution on behalf of the African Union.
The resolution encourages governments, schools, international organisations, media organisations and technology companies to use equal-area map projections when representing the relative size of territories.
However, with a size of 30.3 million square kilometres compared to Greenland's 2.17 million square kilometers, Africa is in reality about 14 times larger than Greenland, illustrating how some commonly used map projections can alter the visual perception of the size of continents.
Under the cooperation framework, the three cartographers will provide scientific and technical support to countries and institutions adopting equal-area projections, help develop freely usable reference maps and contribute to educational resources for African education systems.
Dussey welcomed the scientists’ contribution, saying the Equal Earth projection provides Africa with a scientific tool that can support more accurate geographical education.
“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,” he said.
The three scientists provided Africa with an instrument that could now be placed at the service of schools.
The Equal Earth projection was developed in 2018 to create a world map that preserves the relative areas of continents while limiting distortion of their shapes.
The projection was published in August 2018 in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. It has been used by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and integrated into Esri software.
The African Union subsequently adopted Equal Earth as its institutional cartographic reference through decision Assembly/AU/Dec.959 (XXXIX).
That adoption provides the scientific basis for the “Correct the Map” initiative, which seeks to promote the use of equal-area projections where the relative size of territories is important.
The initiative is based on concerns that commonly used world map projections can visually distort the relative size of continents and countries, particularly those located at higher latitudes.
The implementation phase will focus on putting scientific and technical expertise behind the resolution, including developing reference materials and supporting the adoption of appropriate map projections in education and other institutions.