Natural Earth’s editorial policy is to show political boundaries according to their de facto status. We show disputed areas and boundaries, too, so you can repurpose to suit your needs. This policy has been in place since the project launch in 2009.

Natural Earth draws boundaries of sovereign states according to de facto (“in fact”) status rather than de jure (“by law”). We show who actually controls the situation on the ground because it turns out laws vary country to country, and countries are only loosely bound by international law in their dealings with each other. While our de facto policy does not please everyone, it is rigorous and self consistent.

Our project’s premise is to “Increase geographic literacy by making it easy to compile and publish maps from high-quality, free, and open data.” Natural Earth data is used by millions of people in every country around the globe. Over time we’ve added name localizations for 26 popular locales via Wikidata to meet those users in their language.

The project’s authors regularly hear feedback that Natural Earth’s de facto viewpoint doesn’t work for every legal jurisdiction, so in version 5 released December 2021, we added official support for multiple points-of-view about boundaries (eg worldviews).

Our north star for adding boundary point-of-view is our belief that a school teacher should be able to teach geography with maps based on Natural Earth data without that teacher worrying about legal compliance issues. To that end, version 5 includes a QGIS project file with the quick start download package with variables to quickly change the map visualization’s locale for names and boundary point-of-view for the user’s country. The included README file in the package has more details.

In most cases, sovereign states in Natural Earth are also de jure states that are members of international organizations like the United Nations. But where there is a conflict between sovereign states (or a self-governing breakaway territory), we show the de facto boundary by default (marking it disputed), and delineate the de jure boundary line as an additional “claim” line in an auxiliary data download.

Our rubric: We consider a de facto sovereign state (aka country or nation) to have a government that sustains administrative power over their own physical territory, including some combination of making and enforcing laws for its people, minting money, collecting taxes, raising armies, with longevity, self determination, and being desirous of recognition by other sovereign states. A de facto sovereign state must declare its independence from adjacent sovereign states, otherwise Natural Earth instead considers it a sub-national “map unit”, as with Kurdistan in Iraq. We create polygons for each political territory, built up from boundary lines.

Natural Earth admin-0 features (across sovereignty, country, map unit, map sub unit, and disputed territories) are coded with 512 unique 3-character alpha-numeric codes, including 272 “country” level codes and 103 disputed territory codes. Each country and disputed territory has multiple edge boundary lines with their own default category value and point-of-view alternate category values. We try to keep these admin-0 codes consistent with the 249 codes the International Standards Organization (ISO) designates for its members and their territories, which is already a superset of the 193 official UN member states. The World Trade Organization has only 164 member states and the World Bank has 189. The International Olympic Committee has 206. The CIA World Factbook maintains entries on 262 countries. United States government FIPS codes, French INSEE codes, and Who’s On First IDs are also included for interoperability, when available. Each country is coded with a world region that roughly follows the United Nations setup.

It’s worth noting that not all United Nations member states actually recognize each other! Examples include: Israel, South Korea, North Korea, China, Cyprus, and Armenia. There are also non-member “observers” to the UN like the Holy See and Palestine. There are other states without any representation at the UN, including Taiwan, Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, and Kosovo; this also includes less well known and isolated “countries” (not widely recognized by other sovereign states) like South Ossetia (breakaway from Georgia), Abkhazia (breakaway from Georgia), Donetsk (breakaway from Ukraine), and Luhansk (breakaway from Ukraine), Pridnestrovian (breakaway from Moldovia), Artsakh (breakaway from Azerbaijan, aka Nagorno-Karabakh), and Somaliland (breakaway from Somalia). Some of the above are delineated as sovereign states in Natural Earth, but several of the geographically small and politically isolated polities (often with proxy military involvement by another sovereign state instead of self determination) are instead represented as breakaway polygons and lines in auxiliary downloads. A notable edge case is Somaliland which is treated as a sovereign state in Natural Earth because it meets the rubric above.

We recommend users mashup our countries and disputed areas themes to match their particular political outlook. 

Starting in version 5, we introduced optional “point-of-view” (POV) or “worldview” for administrative geographies.

1. Adds support for alternate points of view in admin-0 related themes with fclass_* properties (like fclass_iso).
   • The following country and international organizations worldviews are supported:
     • Argentina (ar), Bangladesh (bd), Brazil (br), China (cn), Egypt (eg), France (fr), Germany (de), Greece (gr), India (in), Indonesia (id), Israel (il), Italy (it), Japan (jp), Morocco (ma), Nepal (np), Netherlands (nl), Pakistan (pk), Palestine (ps), Poland (pl), Portugal (pt), Russia (ru), Saudi Arabia (sa), South Korea (ko), Spain (es), Sweden (se), Taiwan (tw), Turkey (tr), United Kingdom (gb), United States (us), Vietnam (vn), ISO (iso)
2. Provides easy alternate download of ne_10m_admin_0_countries themes preassembled for the 31 different viewpoints, like ne_10m_admin_0_countries_arg for Argentina.
   1. Full list of countries:
      1. Argentina (arg), Bangladesh (bdg), Brazil (bra), China (chn), Germany (deu), Egypt (egy), Spain (esp), France (fra), United Kingdom (gbr), Greece (grc), Indonesia (idn), India (ind), Israel (isl), Italy (ita), Japan (jpn), South Korea (kor), Morocco (mar), Nepal (nep), Netherlands (nld), Pakistan (pak), Poland (pol), Portugal (prt), Palestine (pse), Russia (rus), Saudi Arabia (sau), Sweden (swe), Turkey (tur), Taiwan (twn), Ukraine (ukr), United States of America (usa), and Vietname (vnm).

We include a disputed area disclaimer on each admin-0 theme web page, which is also included in each ZIP download with the shapefiles.

Last updated 2022-02-27