This week our planet welcomed its eight billionth resident.

Vinice Mabansag was born in the Philippines capital, Manila, at 1.29am on Tuesday, 15 November.

Her arrival was noted by the United Nations as being the symbolic 8,000,000,000th human on Earth, 12 years after we hit 7 billion.

‘This unprecedented growth is due to the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine,’ the UN said.

‘It is also the result of high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries.’

But while that number seems huge, the UN has said the world’s population increase is actually slowing down.

They estimate it will be 15 years before we hit nine billion because, as they put it, ‘the overall growth rate of the global population is slowing.’

Demographers note that the overall growth rate has fallen steadily to less than 1% per year. In countries like the United States and Japan – as well as Europe – the birth rates are slowing. Most of the current growth is coming from middle-income countries in Asia.

Michael Herrman, a senior adviser for economics and demography at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said – as of 2021 – 60 per cent of the world’s population lived in countries at or below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

That’s an increase from 40 per cent in 2019.

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So, what’s going on?

There are a number of reasons for the fall in birth rates, but it largely comes down to contraception, education and economics.

Data shows that areas of the world where education and rights for women are lacking have the highest fertility rates.

Many experts say that access to contraceptives is the fundamental reason behind falling fertility levels.

In other areas of the world, simple cost is the overriding reason behind falling birth rates.

Many people want to have good jobs, stable relationships and suitable housing before having children.

In the UK, for instance, the cost of raising a child to age 18 is around £160,000, according to the Child Poverty Action Group.

As we know, achieving these things is taking longer and longer as wages stagnate in relation to cost of living. Therefore people are waiting longer, having less children or, in some cases, choosing to remain childless altogether.

For individual countries, rather than the world, another major factor is migration.

Migration to wealthy nations has been preventing population declines in many such countries. But Herrman says that ‘net immigration has circumvented population decline in some Western European countries, for example, but high net emigration has exacerbated population decline in some of their Eastern European neighbours.’

Even regardless of the declines in rates, population is still going to increase for the foreseeable future.

‘If all fertility rates were at replacement level, then the world population would still hit 9 billion in 2039 – only two years later than current projections,’ wrote Melanie Channon, a reader in Social Policy at the University of Bath and Jasmine Fledderjohann, a senior lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University.

‘Short of an unprecedented disaster, the population will continue to grow.

‘Even Covid-19 mortality had a very small effect on the size of the global population. The World Health Organization estimates that 14.9 million excess deaths were associated with Covid in 2020 and 2021.

‘This is a very large absolute number, but it is dwarfed by the 269 million births that happened in the same period.’

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