While developed economies (Global North) have emitted historically in terms of cumulative carbon emissions, developing economies (Global South) suffer disproportionate climate impacts due to their geography and limited adaptive capacity. Here, we focus on two economies – Brazil and India. The objective of the study is to analyse the disaster profile of these economies with a focus on climate disaster linkages discussed in the literature. Using disaster data for the period 1970–2020, we show the disaster profile of these economies. In Brazil, it is mainly flood deaths, whereas in India, disaster deaths are mainly due to floods, landslides, earthquakes, storms and extreme temperatures. We also tabulated the economic damages form disasters as a percentage of GDP. Select studies on Brazil have established the climate-disaster link, but for India, we did not find a study linking natural disasters to climate change. Nonetheless, there is immense literature on how climate-induced disasters cause economic losses and overall loss of prosperity. This is also captured through the ‘keyword co-occurrence analysis’, which is a network analysis under ‘bibliometric review’. The articles in the bibliometric study were extracted from Dimensions AI-scientific research database covering the period 2000–2023. The thematic patterns obtained by ‘keyword co-occurrence analysis’ show that words such as ‘disaster’, ‘climate change’, ‘social vulnerability’ and ‘natural hazard’ among others are found to be more important. In the light of these observations, our policy implication is that developing economies should take steps to mitigate climate change impacts and develop disaster resilience.