I read recently- somewhere, maybe even here- that because we have altered most of the very fire prone savanna around the world, that total annual area burned has declined over the past few centuries.
This surprised me- probably mostly because I live in the boreal and fire season is definitely getting longer.
So I noodled around to look for evidence, pro or con and what I found is....it's complicated.
Yes it does appear that global fire incidence is lower now than a couple of hundred years ago, but there are strong regional variations.
Complicating my search is the fact that the denier-sphere has, naturally, latched onto this trend as evidence for whatever thing it is that they are denying.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is pretty legit.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4874420/Extract:
"Thus, while there are clearly some noteworthy trends in area burned for specific recent periods and regions, the general perception of increasing fire around the world is not supported by the data available to date. This does not withstand the observation of increasing fire season length in some areas [50], which is an important contributor to the increase in area burned during this century in the northwestern USA [43,46], boreal Canada and Alaska [51,52]. A future lengthening of the fire season is also anticipated for many other regions of the globe, with a potential associated increase of fire activity [19,53–56]. It is, however, important to recognize that in addition to direct climatic factors, other factors such as fuel availability and human influence will also strongly affect future fire activity [57,58].
Thus the widespread use of limited datasets or excessive extrapolation of short-term regional trends may go some way in explaining the widely held view of generally increasing fire around the world. The wider impacts of fire on society examined in §3b–d, however, may be even more relevant in driving the overall perceptions of fire trends."