5 live Drive's Population Week

This month a baby will be born who will bring the world's population to seven billion. It's thought they will probably be born on 31 October, in Uttar Pradesh, India.

The net increase in population is two people per second so every time you hear this beep another person is born.

To put this in a 5 live context, in the year Peter Allen was born, 1946, the world's population stood at just 2.3 billlion. By the time Aasmah Mir was born in 1971 it had risen to 3.75 billion.

Concerns about this rise in population are not new. At the end of the 18th century, with the population at around a billion, economist and demographer Thomas Malthus was predicting the number of inhabitants would outstrip resources. Fears of a population explosion in the 1950s and 1960s culminated in a 1968 book The Population Bomb which warned of mass starvation. Others have argued (including science writer Fred Pearce who joins us on Friday) that with falling birth rates across the globe, this 'bomb' has already been defused. The number of people in the world has doubled since 1968, but the same central question remains: Can the earth support so many people?

All this week Drive will be addressing this question by looking at the costs and causes of the rising population.

On Monday Drive will look at the overcrowding in cities - in the UK, and in Nigeria, India and China - and how these countries have adapted to cope with it.

Tuesday will tackle how to provide enough food for seven billion mouths.

Wednesday brings it back home as we look specifically at the UK and ask the question Is Britain full?

Thursday looks at ageing. As people live longer and longer because of medical advances, are there enough resources to care for them?

Friday returns to the original question - Is the world big enough for seven billion people? And we'll speak to the woman at the UN who has the record of every known birth since the 1960s.

Jim Connolly is a Senior Broadcast Journalist in the 5 live Drive production team