While the world has watched with fear and fascination the fires burning in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, satellite images show a far greater number of blazes on the African continent.
NASA has called Africa the "fire continent" that's home to at least 70 per cent of the 10,000 fires burning worldwide on an average August day. The agency says the number of fires is consistent from year to year.
While French President Emmanuel Macron has said he is considering launching an international campaign to help sub-Saharan African countries fight fires, experts say the situation there is different and not yet a growing problem though it could become a threat in future.
Angola had about three times more fires than Brazil over a few days last week, according to NASA satellite imagery, which indicated more than 6,000 fires in Angola, more than 3,000 in Congo and just over 2,000 in Brazil.
Though Angola and Congo dominate in numbers of fires, they often occur in sparsely wooded savannas and on fields cultivated by small farmers, making them less of a concern for deforestation than those in the Amazon, said Sally Archibald, a professor at Wits University in Johannesburg.
"There are fire management questions in these (African) ecosystems, but fire is part of their ecology," said Archibald, who studies fire management and savanna dynamics.
"In South America, the equivalent non-forest woodlands have been largely converted to soybean agriculture already, but in Africa they are largely untransformed."
"The main message is: yes we have a lot of fire, but it's not bad and can be very good for the ecology," she said. "We don't know how many deforestation fires we have but the best evidence is that our forests are not decreasing, they are in fact increasing."
"Fires are therefore often a critical component of these ecosystems and are not perceived as harmful by local communities," he said. "Indeed, fires are often used for agricultural purposes, for example to keep the landscape open to support livestock, as well as sometimes as part of shifting cultivation."
"It is therefore certainly a possibility that this may change in future."
"You need a global ambitious programme or you train people to use other practices for people to go into intensive agriculture. You have to organize these small farmers by giving them fertilizer, seeds."