The Equal Earth map projection is a new global equal-area projection developed by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny. It’s been designed to be aesthetically pleasing, with a shape similar to the Robinson projection, while also showing all countries, north or south, correctly sized. It’s been blowing up on Twitter, and has been implemented in PROJ4, but I haven’t been able to get on the bandwagon. Until now!

To get this working in R, start by upgrading PROJ4 to version 5.2.0 using homebrew with brew upgrade, then update the sf package making sure to compile it from source with install.package("sf", type = "source"). Now, when you load sf you should see that it’s linking to proj 5.2.0. Unfortunately, although PROJ4 has Equal Earth support, the current version of GDAL on homebrew doesn’t, so using st_transform(crs = "+proj=eqearth") won’t work. I found the solution in this GitHub issue: use "+proj=eqearth +wktext" to pass the coordinates unmodified to PROJ. Hopefully GDAL will be updated soon, making this work around obsolute, but if you want to get on this Equal Earth train now, here’s a simple example.

First, to plot a world map with sf, including country borders and graticules from Natural Earth:

library(sf)
library(rnaturalearth)

# natural earth data
countries <- ne_countries(returnclass = "sf") %>%
st_transform(crs = "+proj=eqearth +wktext") %>%
st_geometry()
returnclass = "sf") %>%
st_transform(crs = "+proj=eqearth +wktext") %>%
st_geometry()
returnclass = "sf") %>%
st_transform(crs = "+proj=eqearth +wktext") %>%
st_geometry()

# sf plot
par(mar = c(0, 0, 0, 0))
plot(graticules, col = "grey20", lwd = 0.3)
plot(bb, col = NA, border = "grey20", lwd = 1.2, add = TRUE)
plot(countries, col = "grey80", border = "grey40", lwd = 0.8, add = TRUE)


To plot a similar map with ggplot2:

library(rnaturalearth)
library(ggplot2)

countries <- ne_countries(returnclass = "sf")