Asian Basic and Applied Research Journal

Risk, vulnerability, and resilience have become central concepts across disaster studies, climate adaptation, development, public health, urban planning, and economic policy. This study maps the recent intellectual, conceptual, and social structure of research that connects these concepts with developing and emerging economies. A corpus of 560 English-language records published between 2020 and 2026 was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and analysed with the bibliometrix package in R. Performance analysis was combined with author, source, country, co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, thematic, and reference co-citation analyses. The corpus comprised 312 sources and displayed an annual growth rate of 16.02%, an average of 14.99 citations per document, 3.94 co-authors per document, and 38.21% international co-authorship. China and India contributed the largest numbers of corresponding-author publications, while Sustainability and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction were the most productive sources. Climate change, adaptation, disaster management, and sustainability formed the dominant conceptual core, whereas agriculture, food security, poverty, adaptive capacity, and governance constituted a more applied livelihood-oriented strand. The keyword communities were only weakly separated, indicating overlap rather than discrete subfields. The country network also showed multiple collaboration groupings, but these patterns should not be treated as direct evidence of research leadership or funding dependence. Co-citation results indicated a substantially shared intellectual foundation rooted in vulnerability assessment, social–ecological resilience, community resilience, and disaster-risk scholarship. The study shows a rapidly expanding and interdisciplinary literature in which climate-related concerns are prominent, while also identifying opportunities for stronger integration across policy, institutional, household, and livelihood scales.