Climate change will push the planet worryingly close to its boundaries, across all latitudes and levels of development. One question therefore is the extent to which climate change does (and will) severely afect societies’ livelihoods, health, well-being, and cultures. This paper discusses the “severe climate risks” concept developed under Working Group II’s contribution to the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, AR5, and AR6). Focusing on low-lying coastal socio-ecological systems (LCS) and acknowledging that attempts to defne “severe” climate risk have been problematic at the level of global syntheses, we argue for a more place- and people-based framing relating to “habitability under a changing climate.” We summarize habitability in terms of fve habitability pillars: land, freshwater, food, settlement and infrastructure, and economic and subsistence activities; we acknowledge social and cultural factors (including perceptions, values, governance arrangements, human agency, power structures) as criti￾cal underlying factors rather than as separate pillars. We further develop the habitability framing and examine climate risk to future human health and habitability for three climate “hotspot” archetypes (arctic coasts, atoll islands, densely populated urban areas). Build￾ing on the IPCC AR6 framing of severe climate risks, we discuss three key parameters describing severe climate risks in LCS: the point of irreversibility of changes, physical and socio-ecological thresholds, and cascading efects across various habitability dimensions.