Letter to the Editor on 'Nonlinear dynamics of fires in Africa over recent decades controlled by precipitation'.

This is a Letter to the Editor on Wei et al., 26, 4495-4505. We argue that the authors significantly underestimated current trends in fire activity in sub-Saharan Africa and did not support by the data one of the study's main conclusions regarding the primary driver of the decline in fire activity in Northern Hemisphere Africa. We provided the time series of burned area and cropland land cover type to demonstrate that the inverse relationship between fire activity and cropland expansion in the most fire-prone continent, as was suggested by the authors, was not observed. Underestimation of the current trend in fire activity distorts the reality of the situation in the only continent with a significant recent decline in the burned area. This underestimation, coupled with an erroneous identification of the main drivers of fire activity, can cloud the understanding and modeling interactions between fire, climate, and humans and, as a result, the future prediction of fire activity based on changing climate conditions and socio-economic changes.