The idea of adaptation limits is difficult to downscale meaningfully to community level in rural coastal locations in poorer Asia-Pacific countries. Regional/national adaptive strategies are often unable to adequately capture the diversity of such communities, particularly with respect to their individual adaptive capacities and needs. To address such problems, the concept of the ‘adaptation ceiling’ is introduced to denote the sharp boundary between a collectively manageable (tolerable) risk, defined as one to which an impacted community can autonomously adapt and from which they can eventually recover, and an collectively unmanageable (intolerable) risk to which a community cannot autonomously adapt and will never be able to return subsequently to their pre-impact condition. Observations suggest that in most cases, the adaptation ceiling will be ruptured as a result of an extreme event rather than iterative changes to which such communities can generally adapt incrementally. Along Asia-Pacific coasts, each rural community has its own adaptation ceiling which, when plotted alongside ‘community coping ability’, may identify a point (in the future) at which that community will no longer be viable in the place it is currently doing what it currently does to sustain its inhabitants. The concept of an adaptation ceiling is illustrated for five (pairs of) rural communities along Asia-Pacific coasts (Charfassion and Tazumuddin Villages on Bhola Island in Bangladesh; Natokalau and Visoto Villages on Ovalau Island in Fiji; Tebunginako Village on Abaiang Atoll in Kiribati; Hpondawbye and West Hpondawbye Villages in the Ayeyarwady Delta in Myanmar; Lataw Village on Tegua Island in Vanuatu). In many poorer Asia-Pacific countries, governments are invariably focused on adaptation (resilience building) in more populous (urban) areas so that in the future, as the pace of climate change accelerates, numerous rural communities are likely to have to develop and drive their own (autonomous) adaptive strategies. Many such coastal communities, particularly those with narrow livelihood ranges, are approaching their adaptation ceilings, typically as coastal population densities increase and as sea level rises and coastal flooding becomes more frequent. This signals the growing need for such communities to understand the proximity of their adaptation ceilings and to plan autonomously for radical (transformative) change in anticipation of their imminent rupture.