DAKAR, Senegal — As images of wildfires in South America’s Amazon region draw global attention, a large and potentially devastating series of fires is raging in Central Africa and parts of Southern Africa.

Among the regions at risk is the Congo Basin forest, the second-largest tropical rainforest, after the Amazon, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The region absorbs tons of carbon dioxide, a key in the fight against climate change, and has been called the world’s “second lung,” following the Amazon.

At the Group of 7 summit of political leaders this week, amid a global feud over how to handle the Brazil blazes, President Emmanuel Macron of France published a Twitter message acknowledging the Africa burns and saying he was considering an aid program to help.

Fire experts, however, are cautioning against comparing the situations in Africa and South America too closely. While the fires are racing through environmentally critical rain forests in Brazil and Bolivia, in Central Africa, they are incinerating savanna and scrubbier land, and mostly licking at the edges of the rainforest, said Lauren Williams, a forest expert with Global Forest Watch who is based in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital.