Edward Percy Stebbing

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.

[1] He was born in London on 4 January 1872, and was the second son of Edward Charles Stebbing (b.

[3] He served on the Serbian Front in Macedonia, taking part in the Battle of Kajmakčalan and acting as transport officer to the Scottish Women's Hospitals.

His proposers were Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker, Ralph Allan Sampson, Arthur Crichton Mitchell and James Hartley Ashworth.