Climate change adaptation governance in coastal cities should not be delayed. From Guangzhou to Miami, coastal cities around the globe are at great risks of damaging floods. In addition to focusing on the technology to cope with floods and extreme weathers, the current situation also requires the government to develop a better legal and administrative coordination framework to deal with this cutting edge issue. This paper proposes that mainstreaming the adaptation processes and facilitating interagency coordination will increase the flexibility and enhance efficiency when responding to the fast-changing and unpredictable nature of climate change. This paper looks into a new town project in Taiwan – Dan Hai New Town Project to bring these theoretical concepts into practice and to see how the existing regulations and administrative mechanisms can be revised or improved to respond to climate change.

Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation into Planning
While adaptation plan for the coast may be a stand-alone process, incorporating adaptation plan in to varying degrees in local planning efforts is more efficient. Adaptation concepts and measures can be mainstreamed into the urban planning process through statutory interpretation or legal revision. This paper divides urban planning legal processes into two types. One is main planning processes led by the planning or development agency; the other is the reviewing processes examined by the supervising agency or committee. Under the first type of processes, the development agency must take adaptive action through law interpretation or rules. Guidance and rules are widely utilized to integration of adaptation planning. The second type of processes is to check whether the project is adaptive or not.

Interagency Coordination in the context of Climate Change Adaptation
To successfully implement the processes, we need to further gather resources and powers in various agencies. This paper believes that interagency coordination is the most flexible and efficient way to tackle the complex climate change issue. And there are two types of tools to fulfill this goal: one is statutory interagency interaction, where the statutes affirmatively require interagency coordination; the other is pooling the powers, where there is no statutory requirement. There are three mechanisms through which pooling enhances administrative power. First, pooling can be achieved by using one agency’s legal capacity as a lever to augment the regulatory capacity of other agencies. Second, combining one agency’s legal authority with another agency’s expertise, such as interagency agreements and joint policymaking. Third is to blend legal tools. For example, to enhance the workplace safety, an interagency task force has been established combines the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s workplace safety authorities with Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental law tools and other criminal law enforced by the Department of Justices.

Case Study – Dan Hai New Town Project
Dan Hai New Town was a new town project decided in 1992 by the Taiwanese government. The new town was developed to alleviate the tension in the rapid growth of Taipei Metropolis. The new town is located along the northeast coast of Taiwan and 16 km northeast of the Central Taipei City. According to the ‘Climate Change Adaptation Strategy Report in Taiwan’ published in 2012, Dan Hai area is one of the high vulnerability areas. In other words, if the sea level rises to 1.4 meters, Dan Hai might be below the sea level. How an aged planning can be adaptive to the climate change requires both procedural and substantive change.

To mainstream the adaptation into the process, this paper first overviews relevant laws and regulations regarding the new town project development, from Urban Planning Act, Coastal Act, and Environmental Impact Assessment Act to Implementation on Urban Planning Review Act. While the latest amendment of Implementation on Urban Planning Review and the latest legislation of Coastal Act just passed in 2015 have both addressed the climate change adaptation, how can the ongoing new town project apply those regulations into planning process can still be challenging.

Interagency coordination is crucial to fulfill the regulations requirement. In 2010, Taiwanese government established a Task Force for Formulating and Promoting Climate Change Adaptation Policy Framework and Action Plan which includes eight sectors from Disasters to Health, and each sector requires several existing agencies to work together. Tailored to the research on the new town project, this paper focus on Land Use sector, Coastal Zone sector and Disaster sector. This paper found that there is no clear regulation and guidance regarding how agencies cooperate, and believe it is crucial to pool the powers to maximize each agency legal tools to enhance the capacity of the administrative authority. First is using legal lever, for instance, since the urban design review committee holds the authority to decide whether to grant the permit for the developing project to proceed, the permission may be contingent on the approval and the ongoing compliance of the relevant regulations. Second is combining legal authority with expertise, while Construction Planning Agency is in charge of the new town planning project, to build a resilient town, it is vital to borrow the experts in Water Resources Agency to set the reasonable coastal construction standard. The third method is to blend the legal tools, while the Task Force has been established, however each sector has its own action plans and leading agency, and each action plan is implemented by different agencies. And each action plan and the urban planning project might not have a good communication platform or framework. Blending the tools as a concept still requires mechanisms to ensure the success of the coordination made by the agencies.

Conclusion
Multi agency coordination and multi process integration are crucial for climate change adaptation. A new town may solve the immediate problem of growing population in the urban area, however, the government should reevaluate the necessity of building up a new town near the coast, under the severe climate change context – when the sea level is rising and the drought is happening.