Wireless sensor network consists of small battery powered sensors. Therefore, energy consumption is an important issue and several schemes have been proposed to improve the lifetime of the network. In this paper we propose a new approach called energy-driven adaptive clustering hierarchy (EDACH), which evenly distributes the energy dissipation among the sensor nodes to maximize the network lifetime. This is achieved by using proxy node replacing the cluster-head of low battery power and forming more clusters in the region relatively far from the base station. Comparison with the existing schemes such as LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) and PEACH (ProxyEnabled Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) reveals that the proposed EDACH approach significantly improves the network lifetime.