JOHANNESBURG - The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution calling for a world map that better represents Africa's actual size.
The resolution was sponsored by Togo and supported by 164 countries including France and the United Kingdom.
The United States voted against it and six countries abstained.
The Mercator projection has been criticized for making regions near the equator appear smaller than they are.
Africa is about 14 times larger than Greenland despite the two appearing roughly the same size on the Mercator map.
The projection was created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for navigation.
Its distortion reflects the difficulty of representing the spherical Earth on a flat map.