Written by Chien-Liang Lee.
Image credit: 颱風 by Jameson Wu / Flickr, license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.
Introduction
Climate change is an omnipresent issue, with its impacts becoming increasingly evident worldwide—Taiwan should not remain an exception to this pressing challenge. According to official statements, the average annual temperature in Taiwan has risen by approximately 1.6°C over the past 110 years (1911-2020), with an accelerating trend observed in the past five decades. This intensified warming has led to a rise in the number of extremely high-temperature days, an increased frequency of droughts and extreme rainfall events, and increased typhoon intensity, all of which have significantly exacerbated environmental challenges. In response to these consequences, efforts have been directed toward both mitigation and adaptation for stopping or slowing down the progression of global warming and adapting to the inevitable consequences as well. Climate change mitigation focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while adaptation seeks to enhance the resilience and adaptive capacity of natural ecosystems, society, the economy, and infrastructure to the ongoing and anticipated effects of climate change. From a legal perspective, adaptation poses more complex and multifaceted challenges. How Taiwan navigates and develops its legal framework in this regard is a subject of critical importance, which this article seeks to explore.
Overview of Taiwan’s legal framework for climate change adaptation
The development of Taiwan’s legal framework for climate change adaptation follows two primary axes: policy and laws. Policy initiatives typically precede laws, with both progressing in a mutually reinforcing manner. The two are intertwined and progress side by side.
To enhance climate change resilience, the National Development Council (NDC) established a national climate change adaptation promotion mechanism in 2010. It thus formed a specialised task force on “Planning and Promoting Climate Change Adaptation Policy Guidelines and Action Plans.” In 2012, the “National Climate Change Adaptation Policy Guidelines” were passed, followed by the “National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan” (2013–2017) in 2014, which guided various agencies in implementing adaptation measures at the national level.
In 2017, in accordance with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act (GGRMA), the Ministry of Environment submitted the “National Action Program for Response to Climate Change”, which clearly outlined the overall policy guidelines for both greenhouse gas mitigation and climate adaptation. Subsequently, in 2018, the Ministry of Environment, in collaboration with other ministries and councils, introduced the “National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan (2018-2022) to further advance adaptation efforts. In 2021, the GGRMA amendment added a special chapter on adaptation, reinforcing the construction of climate change adaptation capabilities, scientific research integration and the promotion framework of governments at all levels. In 2023, the amendment of the GGRMA to the “Climate Change Response Act” (CCRA) was promulgated. In the same year, the Ministry of Environment, based on the climate change adaptation chapter of CCRA and taking into account the implementation results and problem reviews of previous action plans as well, jointly developed the “National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan (2023-2026)” with various ministries and commissions. The plan added important concepts such as fixed warming scenarios, adaptation framework setting, public participation, and Nature-based Solutions.
It is particularly worth mentioning that the CCRA positions the chapter on climate change adaptation (Chapter 3) before that on emission reduction measures (Chapter 4), which may show the importance that legislators attach to climate change adaptation. However, there are only four articles in Chapter 3, compared to 21 in the emission reduction section, reflecting a lower regulatory density. The practical implication of this regulatory framework needs further examination.
Characteristics of Taiwan’s climate change adaptation legal practice
Since 2010, Taiwan has been implementing climate change adaptation policies and legislation through a three-phase approach under the Climate Change Adaptation Policy Framework and Action Plan. Now in its 15th year, this initiative has completed two phases, with the third phase currently in progress. The outcomes of this latest phase are expected to be evaluated in 2027, reflecting the government’s ongoing dedication and commitment to the task of climate change adaptation.
Based on the implementation outcomes of the National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan (2018-2022), the following characteristics can be identified:
First, Taiwan’s adaptation efforts primarily emphasise technical measures, such as the development of climate-related disaster risk maps and the construction of disaster prevention and relief infrastructure, including meteorological stations. However, there has been relatively little emphasis on causal analyses assessing whether specific disasters are attributable to climate change or the greenhouse effect.
Secondly, climate change adaptation is promoted by each competent authority on a project-by-project basis with allocated budgets. The focus is on unilateral improvement measures taken by each competent authority, which produce point-like and fragmented results, rather than incorporating the people into the action plan and establishing a comprehensive national adaptation mechanism.
Third, which is a corresponding phenomenon to the above characteristics, climate change adaptation has not been systematically incorporated into routine government decision-making, nor has a “climate impact assessment” mechanism for development activities from both the public and private sectors been established.
Reflections on Taiwan’s climate change adaptation legal practice
The aforementioned characteristics not only illustrate the phased progress of Taiwan’s legal framework for climate change adaptation but also highlight its inherent structures that require further supplementation and improvement.
In terms of the competent authorities, climate adaptation efforts are led by the central government, with local governments playing a supporting role. Initially, the central competent authority was the National Development Council, which the Ministry of Environment later replaced. While the former is responsible for national development planning, coordination, review, and resource allocation, the latter is responsible for environmental protection and now has the Climate Change Administration under it. This institutional transition reveals two key issues in Taiwan’s climate adaptation legal framework that merit discussion:
First of all, it is obvious that climate change adaptation extends beyond environmental protection to encompass the resilience and adaptability of society, the economy, and infrastructure. Therefore, an integrated governance mechanism—both vertically across different levels of government and horizontally across sectors—is essential for effective implementation.
Second, from a public law perspective, adaptation policies intersect with multiple regulatory domains of special administrative law, primarily spatial planning, and construction law, as well as various branches of environmental law. Furthermore, the legal discussions surrounding climate adaptation increasingly extend into other areas of administrative law, such as health law (due to expected health impacts from heatwaves) and disaster protection law (in response to extreme weather events such as flooding). In Taiwan, there is even a unique issue of protecting Indigenous peoples. As a result, the implementation of climate change adaptation tasks requires not only cross-departmental integration but also the embedding of adaptation mechanisms within various special administrative laws, such as the National Land Planning Act, the Urban Planning Act, the Construction Act, the Soil and Water Conservation Act, the Indigenous Peoples Protection Act, etc. This stresses the need for policy coherence across regulatory frameworks and highlights the importance of incorporating a “climate impact assessment” mechanism into major policy areas such as agriculture, transportation, energy infrastructure, and development planning.
Conclusion: Shortening the distance between goals and actions
From the preliminary observations, it can be seen that the development of Taiwan’s legal frameworks for climate change adaptation, both in terms of legal norms and formulation and implementation of policy guidelines, is generally well-developed and has taken shape. However, there remains a gap between the current framework and the goal. The most critical missing link is the lack of normative laws and mechanisms, especially the normative connections between the various special administrative laws are not close enough and need to be strengthened.
In a democratic state ruled by law, environmental protection must adhere to the rule of law. To ensure that the law adapts to climate change, the law itself must also evolve. The implementation of legislative purposes takes time, and there is often a time gap between ideals and practice. How to narrow the gap between goals and actions depends on how legal professionals use their legal thinking abilities to construct a legal mechanism that is rigorously argued and rationally feasible.
Chien-Liang Lee, Dr. iur., Göttingen University and Dr. h.c., Jena University, Germany, is a Distinguished Research Professor and Director at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae at Academia Sinica, as well as Professor of Law at National Taiwan University (NTU). His main fields of research include constitutional law, administrative law, environmental protection, and technology law. He currently serves as the Principal Investigator for the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) interdisciplinary research project “In the Age of AI: Reflections on the Humanities and the Rule of Law in the Digital Society”.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Navigating Climate Adaptation Challenges in Taiwan’.