Edward Percy Stebbing

Who was Edward Percy Stebbing?

Edward Percy Stebbing FRGS, FZS was a pioneering British forester and forest entomologist in India. He was among the first to warn of desertification and desiccation and wrote on "The encroaching Sahara". In 1935, he wrote of the "desert whose power is incalculable and whose silent and almost invisible approach must be difficult to estimate." He suggested that this was man-made and this led to a joint Anglo-French forestry mission from December 1936 to February 1937 that toured northern Nigeria and Niger to assess the danger of desertification.