Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.
The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.
Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as “there is a free market for both letters and parcels”.
Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany’s Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a “socially responsible manner”.
Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come.
Denmark had a universal postal service for 400 years until the end of 2023, but as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically.
Fifteen hundred workers facing losing their jobs, out of a workforce of 4,600.
“It’s a super sad day. Not just for our department, but for the 1,500 who face an uncertain future,” employee Anders Raun Mikkelsen told Danish broadcaster DR.
Denmark ranks as one of the world’s most digitalised countries.
There’s an app for almost everything: few people use cash, and Danes even carry drivers’ licences and health cards on their smartphones.
Nauru selling citizenship for $105,000 to save itself from rising seas
Citizenship of Nauru, an island nation spanning just 8 square miles in the southwest Pacific Ocean, can be yours for $105,000. The tiny, low-lying island has launched a “golden passport” initiative with the aim of raising money to fund climate action.
Nauru faces an existential threat from rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion as the planet warms. But the world’s third smallest country lacks the resources to protect itself from a climate crisis disproportionately driven by wealthy countries.
The government says selling citizenship will help raise the funds needed for a plan to move 90% of the island’s around 12,500-strong population onto higher ground and build an entirely new community.
Golden passports are not new but they are controversial; history is littered with examples of them being exploited for criminal actions. Yet as developing countries struggle to get the money they need to deal with escalating climate impacts — a funding gap likely to be exacerbated by the US withdrawal from global climate action — they are being forced to find new ways to raise cash.
“While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive steps to secure our nation’s future,” Nauru’s President David Adeang told CNN.
The passports will cost a minimum of $105,000, but will be prohibited for people with certain criminal histories. A Nauru passport offers visa-free access to 89 countries including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Few of these new passport holders are likely to ever even visit remote Nauru, but citizenship allows people to lead “global lives,” said Kirstin Surak, associate professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires. This can be particularly useful for those with more restrictive passports, she told CNN.
For Nauru, this program is being pitched as a chance to secure the future of the island, which has a difficult, dark history.
Nauru was strip mined for phosphate from the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape was gouged by miners, leaving the center of the island a near barren landscape of jagged rocks.
It has left around 80% of the island uninhabitable, meaning most people now live clustered along the coastlines, exposed to sea level rise, which has been increasing here at a faster rate than global average.
