In April this year, I discussed Togo's proposal in "West African Country Togo Protests to the United Nations over the World Map Projection." There has been a recent development. According to UN News, on September 4 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution by 164 votes in favor and 1 against, encouraging governments and schools to switch to equal-area projections such as Equal Earth when area comparison is emphasized.

Instead of using a ready-made map, I decided to create the projection myself. I used the world map vector data that I processed in "GIS Data: Sharing World Map Vector Data by Country in Shapefile Format" for testing.

Using QGIS

In QGIS, you can use Equal Earth directly with the built-in EPSG codes. Three are currently included.

  • EPSG:8857 WGS84 Equal Earth Greenwich, centered on the 0 degree meridian
  • EPSG:8859 WGS84 Equal Earth Asia-Pacific, centered on the Asia-Pacific region
  • EPSG:8858 WGS84 Equal Earth Americas, centered on the Americas

If you only need to display the map in the Equal Earth style, it is very simple: click the coordinate system button in the lower-right corner.

The result looks like this:

If you need to reproject the data, right-click the layer, choose Export > Save Features As, and then select the corresponding EPSG code.

Using ArcGIS Pro

ArcGIS Pro also makes this very easy. ArcGIS Pro 2.3 or later includes the Equal Earth projection natively. Double-click the map to open Map Properties, switch to the Coordinate Systems tab, and search for Equal Earth.

After applying it, the result looks like this:

If you need to change the projected coordinate system of the data source, you can use the Project tool.

References

  1. UN calls on the world: stop making Africa look so small on maps: https://news.un.org/zh/story/2026/09/1142746
  2. Equal Earth website: https://equal-earth.com/
  3. Equal Earth projection description: https://equal-earth.com/equal-earth-projection.html