There is a projection called Equal Earth. It was published in 2018, it is equal-area, and it is fine.
Until recently, I did not care very much about it. Cartographers invent projections all the time, and there is nothing objectionable about three cartographers deciding that the existing equal-area projections did not quite suit their aesthetic preferences and designing another one.
What made me start caring was the United Nations vote in September 2026 encouraging governments and institutions to adopt, disseminate, and use Equal Earth in contexts where the relative areas of continents matter.1 To be fair, the UN resolution does not claim that Equal Earth is the only legitimate projection: the debate explicitly recognized that different projections serve different purposes, and several delegations emphasized broader support for equal-area projections rather than any exclusive endorsement of one design.1 But once a particular projection is being singled out by an international institution as a preferred response to a genuine problem in geographical representation, its name, its claimed advantages, and its relationship to the projections that came before it matter rather more.
And that last word in the first paragraph — fine — is doing a lot of work. The case for using Equal Earth over the alternatives is thin, while the case against giving it privileged status is a matter of principle that cartographers should take more seriously than they do:
A projection should not be permitted to name itself after the entire class it belongs to.
Equal-area projections are a family with a long history and dozens of members. Lambert's equal-area projections date to the eighteenth century. Mollweide published his projection in 1805. Gall described his cylindrical projection in the nineteenth century. Then came Behrmann, Hammer, Eckert, Wagner, Putniņš, Boggs, Craster, McBryde, Tobler, Goode, Snyder and many others.
Nearly all of these projections were named either after their creators or after their geometry: Mollweide, Eckert IV, sinusoidal, Lambert azimuthal equal-area, cylindrical equal-area. These names identify a particular construction while leaving the category intact for everyone else.
“Equal Earth” does not do this. It takes the defining property of an entire family and turns it into the proper name of one member. The effect is a kind of semantic squatting. If someone now speaks loosely of “the Equal Earth map”, it is remarkably easy for a reader unfamiliar with cartography to come away with the impression that this is the projection which depicts the Earth with equal areas.
That ambiguity is particularly unfortunate because the public discussion surrounding the projection is precisely about equal area. The name does not merely happen to overlap with a technical category; it borrows its principal selling point from that category.
Compare what this would look like elsewhere. Imagine a font released in 2018 called Serif. A programming language called Compiled. A car called The Automobile. We would immediately notice that the name borrows the authority of a category much larger than the thing being named.
Equal Earth is the same move, executed in a field where fewer people are paying attention.
Institutional endorsement makes this substantially worse. “The UN encourages equal-area maps” accurately describes a cartographic principle. “The UN encourages the Equal Earth map” promotes one recently designed projection whose very name makes that distinction harder for the general public to see.
Equal Earth is a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection, explicitly designed to have an overall appearance similar to the Robinson projection while preserving area.2 Its authors describe visually pleasing continental outlines and simple equations as important virtues.2
That is a perfectly reasonable design exercise. It is not a new solution to the problem of preserving area.
The authors' own comparisons make clear how much of the residual design problem was aesthetic. Among the existing equal-area pseudocylindrical projections, Eckert IV and Wagner IV came close to their preferences. Equal Earth was positioned between older designs in matters such as pole-line length, lateral-meridian curvature, and overall outline; the original paper's distortion table even gives Eckert IV slightly lower values than Equal Earth on the two reported mean distortion indices.2
There is nothing wrong with aesthetic judgment. Cartography is partly graphic design. If you dislike the curvature of one projection's boundary, invent another one.
But the accurate description of the achievement is then something like:
We designed another equal-area pseudocylindrical projection because we preferred its particular balance of shape and silhouette.
That is much less momentous than the name suggests.
The design space of equal-area pseudocylindrical projections with curved meridians and finite pole lines was already richly populated. Equal Earth occupies another reasonable point in that design space. The gap it filled was largely aesthetic and presentational.
A projection that fills an aesthetic gap in a mature mathematical problem has certainly earned the right to exist. It has not earned the right to name itself after the problem.
Consider the alternatives.
Eckert IV is equal-area, has a finite pole line, elliptical meridians and moderate distortion. It does essentially the same general job as Equal Earth. Put them beside one another and the difference is not that one preserves area and the other does not. Both do. The difference is largely the exact curvature and proportions that their designers preferred.
Indeed, in the distortion table published with Equal Earth, Eckert IV scores slightly better than Equal Earth on both the reported overall scale-distortion index and mean angular-deformation index.2 That does not make Eckert IV objectively “better” — no pair of summary indices settles the design of a map — but it does make it hard to argue that Equal Earth displaced an obviously inferior predecessor.
Wagner IV occupies another nearby part of the same design space. It has a compact, restrained appearance and finite pole lines. Whether its outer meridians bulge too much is not a cartographic fact. It is a matter of taste.
Mollweide remains, to my eye, one of the most elegant world projections ever devised. The entire world fits naturally into a 2:1 ellipse. The poles are points, as poles actually are. The projection is exactly equal-area. Its symmetry is immediately intelligible, and its mathematics is pleasantly economical.
Its point poles cause strong east-west compression at very high latitudes. The Equal Earth designers regard point poles as a disadvantage partly because very high latitudes leave less horizontal space for labels.
I find this argument unconvincing for a general world map. Major countries, capitals, oceans and geographical features can be labelled perfectly adequately on a Mollweide map. If the purpose of a particular map is to label every channel and island in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, then the problem has ceased to be the choice of a world projection. It needs a regional inset.
It seems backwards to blow the pole up into an entire line chiefly because this gives the typographer more room. The projection represents the Earth; labels are a graphic layer placed on top of it. I would rather adapt the typography to a geometrically satisfying projection than choose the geometry to accommodate unusually demanding labels.
Behrmann is a cylindrical equal-area projection with standard parallels at 30°. When a map genuinely benefits from being rectangular — because of gridded data, tiled layouts, or some other practical requirement — the cylindrical equal-area family provides an extremely transparent solution. There is one obvious parameter controlling the compromise, and Behrmann chooses a moderate value.
Gall-Peters is another member of that same cylindrical equal-area family, using standard parallels at 45°. It preserves area exactly, but does so with a shape tradeoff I find much less attractive: equatorial Africa and South America become conspicuously elongated while higher latitudes are compressed.
Its importance is historical rather than mathematical, and that history is worth returning to below.
Lambert azimuthal equal-area is, meanwhile, one of the cleanest projections in the subject. For a sphere of radius one, if
The equal-area property is almost visible from the formula:
exactly the area of the corresponding spherical cap.
It is difficult to ask for a more satisfying piece of cartographic mathematics.
The projection can even place the whole sphere in one disc, at the cost of blowing the antipode of the centre up into the boundary. Choose the centre appropriately and that singular behaviour can be pushed into an unimportant part of the Pacific. But there is an even cleaner solution.
Why must a world map consist of one continuous blob?
That convention imposes a large part of the difficulty. Every one-piece pseudocylindrical world map has to accommodate points almost halfway around the globe from its central meridian while remaining a single continuous figure. Considerable shape distortion somewhere near the outer parts is inevitable.
Instead, divide the Earth into two hemispheres and project each with Lambert azimuthal equal-area.
Now every displayed point is at angular distance at most
whose product is one, as required by equal-area preservation.
At the edge of a hemisphere,
Thus even at the boundary, the ratio between the principal scales is only
The result is two circles, each radially symmetric, each exactly equal-area, and each with distortion increasing smoothly and transparently away from its centre.
That strikes me as a far more principled compromise than carefully tuning coefficients until the outline looks sufficiently Robinson-like.
The cost is a seam. For many world maps that cost is cheap. Choose the hemispheres sensibly — for example around the traditional Atlantic/Pacific division — and almost every major continental landmass remains comfortably within one hemisphere. For an atlas plate, classroom poster or static reference map, I would happily trade continuity across an ocean for substantially cleaner geometry.
If a single joined outline really is important, Hammer provides another beautifully simple equal-area option closely related geometrically to Lambert azimuthal equal-area.
The Gall-Peters controversy is the obvious precedent, because it shows exactly why claims of uniqueness matter in map projections.
James Gall had already described the projection in the nineteenth century. When Arno Peters popularised essentially the same projection in the 1970s, he did not merely argue that equal-area maps were preferable to Mercator for certain purposes. He promoted his map as a fundamentally new and uniquely truthful solution — an “area-correct” world map correcting the distortions and political biases of conventional cartography.3
That claim was false in two different ways.
First, the projection itself was not new. Gall had described essentially the same construction long before Peters.3
Second, and more importantly, it was not remotely the only “area-correct” map. Equal-area cartography was already a mature field with many competing projections preserving area exactly. Contemporary and later accounts of the controversy specifically identify Peters' claim that his was the only “area-correct” map as inaccurate.4
Peters nevertheless promoted it as if it possessed a unique claim to correctness. The rhetoric repeatedly contrasted Mercator with Peters as though the world faced a choice between a politically distorted map and Peters' uniquely “area-correct” alternative.
The phrase itself did enormous rhetorical work. If Peters was the area-correct map, the natural implication was that other world maps were area-incorrect.
This was a major reason the projection provoked such intense hostility among professional cartographers. The objection was not simply that they disliked its appearance. Cartographers challenged Peters' claims of novelty, his claims of uniqueness, and the implication that one particular projection was uniquely honest while the rest of cartography was somehow deceptive.3
The rhetoric was especially powerful because the comparison was usually made against Mercator.
Mercator visibly enlarges high latitudes. Greenland looks enormous next to Africa. Northern Europe, Canada and Russia occupy far more visual space than their area warrants. Once Peters framed the issue as
distorted Mercator versus area-correct Peters,
the conclusion seemed morally obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the wider field.
But that was a false binary.
The real choice was never:
Mercator or Peters.
It was:
Mercator, when its conformal properties are useful, or one of many equal-area projections when preserving relative area matters.
There was nothing about the Peters projection that made it uniquely capable of displaying Africa at its correct relative area. Many other projections did exactly that.
Peters' great success was rhetorical rather than mathematical. He managed to make one member of a large and old family appear to much of the public as though it were synonymous with the family's defining property.
Cartographers reacted with unusual vehemence because this was not merely a disagreement over taste. It damaged public understanding of what a map projection is. Rather than teaching that every flat map involves tradeoffs and that projection choice depends on purpose, the Peters campaign offered a morality play with a villain and a solution: Mercator was deceptive; Peters was truthful.
The controversy became intense enough that in 1989 seven North American geographic and cartographic organizations issued a joint resolution discouraging rectangular world maps for general-purpose or artistic display.5 The resolution was broader than an attack on Peters alone, but the map-projection controversy of the period was the context in which such an extraordinary intervention made sense.
That episode should have left cartography with a particularly strong institutional memory:
Equal area is a property, not a brand.
Which is why “Equal Earth” is such an unfortunate name.
The Equal Earth authors are not Arno Peters. Their technical work openly discusses earlier equal-area projections, and they explicitly compare their design with alternatives such as Eckert IV, Wagner IV, Putniņš P4′ and others.2 There is no serious basis for accusing them of claiming that equal-area cartography began in 2018.
That makes the branding almost ironic.
The danger is not that the Equal Earth authors literally repeat Peters' false claim that theirs is the only area-correct map. They do not.
The danger is that the name and public presentation recreate a softer version of the same false binary:
distorted conventional map versus Equal Earth.
The very name Equal Earth encourages a reader unfamiliar with projection theory to treat one projection as though it embodied the principle of equal-area mapping itself.
The public-facing material does not always help. The Equal Earth website introduces the projection chiefly as a visually pleasing alternative to Gall-Peters, highlights its Robinson-like appearance, and prominently compares Equal Earth with Gall-Peters.6 Someone encountering the subject there for the first time could easily receive the impression that the relevant history runs from Mercator to Gall-Peters to Equal Earth, rather than through a large family of long-established equal-area alternatives.
Equal-area world maps were already a mature part of cartography long before 2018.
The authors know this perfectly well. Their technical paper makes that clear. That makes the simplified promotional framing more unfortunate, not less.
The strongest objection to all of this is obvious: names are arbitrary, Equal Earth is a perfectly good projection, so who cares?
Names are part of how a field teaches itself. Cartography has spent a long time trying to explain a genuinely difficult fact to the public: every flat map distorts something. There is no universally correct projection. There are projections whose properties make them suitable for particular purposes.
That message is hard won and easily lost.
A projection called Equal Earth quietly works against it. The name suggests finality: this is the equal one, the fair one, the projection in which Earth has finally been represented properly. It now sits in a public conversation about Mercator, colonialism and the relative visual prominence of continents, circumstances in which that implication becomes particularly powerful.
Yet Equal Earth did not solve a previously unsolved equal-area problem. It introduced another aesthetic choice within an already mature family of projections.
I happen not to share those aesthetic preferences. I think Mollweide is substantially more beautiful. I prefer its simple ellipse, its genuine point poles and the transparency of its geometry. If one permits two hemispheres, I like Lambert azimuthal equal-area better still.
But those aesthetic disagreements are secondary.
My principal objection is that one projection should not appropriate the name of the property shared by an entire field of alternatives and then, through successful branding and institutional endorsement, become confused with the principle itself.
So use Eckert IV. Use Wagner IV. Use Mollweide. Use Hammer. Use Behrmann when a rectangle is genuinely useful. Use Goode homolosine when interruption is acceptable. Use Lambert azimuthal equal-area for regions, hemispheres, or paired hemispheres.
Or use Equal Earth, if you genuinely prefer how it looks.
Just do not pretend that choosing Equal Earth is the same thing as choosing equal area.
All of these projections preserve area. None of them has exclusive claim to an equal Earth.
Footnotes
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United Nations General Assembly, 80th session, 114th plenary meeting, 4 September 2026, transcript of the debate on Correct the Map: Rebalancing Global Cartographic Representation and Promoting Equitable Representation of the World's Regions, Particularly Africa, to Accurately Represent the Relative Size of Continents. The debate states that the resolution does not impose one projection for all uses and recognizes the diversity of projections, while also discussing language encouraging adoption, dissemination and use of Equal Earth: https://transcripts.un.org/en/ga/80/114?t=3519. See also Associated Press, “UN General Assembly endorses a new world map that shows more accurately Africa's size,” 5 September 2026: https://apnews.com/article/b138fe9f76d7ff54cc7d5c9b1ddfa983. ↩ ↩2
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Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, “The Equal Earth map projection,” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 33, no. 3 (2019), 454–465, first published online 7 August 2018: https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2018.1504949. The paper describes Equal Earth as a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection inspired by Robinson and compares its geometry and distortion indices with several older equal-area projections. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
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Mark Monmonier discusses the Peters controversy and its claims extensively in Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection (University of Chicago Press, 2004). For an academic overview focused specifically on the controversy, see Andrea Favretto, “Arno Peters and ‘his’ projection: A controversial history,” Bollettino dell'Associazione Italiana di Cartografia 170 (2020), 202–215: https://www.openstarts.units.it/handle/10077/32251. For a detailed historical study, see Jeremy Crampton, “Cartography's Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy, 1974–1990.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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A concise summary of the controversy notes that Peters' campaign was bolstered by the inaccurate claim that his projection was the only “area-correct” map; see “Gall–Peters projection,” Wikipedia, section “Peters world map controversy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection. Contemporary criticism is also reflected in John P. Snyder, “Social Consciousness and World Maps,” The Christian Century, 24 February 1988, which notes that Peters and supporters argued for a uniquely privileged status for his map: https://www.religion-online.org/article/social-consciousness-and-world-maps/. ↩
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The 1989 Resolution on Rectangular World Maps was issued jointly by seven North American geographic and cartographic organizations, including the American Cartographic Association, American Geographical Society, Association of American Geographers, Canadian Cartographic Association, National Council for Geographic Education, National Geographic Society, and the Geography and Map Division of the Special Libraries Association. It appeared in The American Cartographer 16, no. 3 (1989), 222–223. ↩
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Equal Earth project website, “Equal Earth projection”: https://www.equal-earth.com/equal-earth-projection.html. The page describes Equal Earth as a visually pleasing alternative to Gall-Peters, emphasizes its Robinson-like overall shape, and displays a direct Equal Earth/Gall-Peters comparison. ↩