Over a month ago, on July 7, following an intense spell of monsoon rain, a mountain slope collapsed at the construction site of the Anakkampoyil–Kalladi–Meppadi twin tunnel project in Wayanad, Kerala. The incident killed at least eight construction workers and injured ten. The project had been granted environmental clearance in June 2025 along the same stretch of the Western Ghats, which had witnessed two major rainfall-induced landslides previously: Puthumala in 2019 and the devastating Mundakkai–Chooralmala landslides of July 2024, which claimed over 300 lives.After the incident, the Kerala government initiated investigations into allegations that the contractor had failed to remove the excavated soil and had not complied with the conditions stipulated in the environmental clearance. Those questions are now before the authorities. They also point to a less discussed yet pertinent issue that warrants introspection: whether the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process in India should evolve in an era of climate uncertainty.Limits of a pre-climate frameworkThe EIA framework in India was originally designed to anticipate environmental risks posed by major infrastructure projects before they are approved. Conventional assessments are carried out on the assumption that historical environmental conditions offer a reasonable basis for predicting future impacts of such projects. But climate change is increasingly weakening that assumption: rainfall patterns, hydrological systems, and landslide risks are changing. The EIA notification, 2006, the legal framework governing environmental impact assessment in India, has long been criticised on separate grounds – for procedural failures and for repeated dilutions that have weakened its effectiveness. Despite these shortcomings, the EIA notification remains India’s principal instrument for evaluating environmental consequences before a development project begins, and this preventive character makes it well suited to incorporating climate considerations. However, it was framed at a time when climate adaptation had not become a major concern in India. As a result, even though the EIA process involves detailed examination of forests and biodiversity, pollution, geology and hydrology, it does not explicitly require an assessment of how climate change may alter those very environmental conditions over the lifetime of a project. Making the EIA framework climate-sensitive would mainstream climate into the impact assessment of development projects and reduce the risk of approving projects whose environmental impacts may be fundamentally altered by future conditions.Lessons from WayanadThe deliberations surrounding the Wayanad tunnel project are instructive because the environmental appraisal stage here was not perfunctory by current standards. The Kerala State Level Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC) subjected the project to sustained scrutiny, recognising that the alignment passes through fragile terrain affected by devastating landslides in 2019 and 2024 and through villages notified as Ecologically Sensitive Areas. It considered the proposal across nine meetings before recommending environmental clearance in March 2025, with conditions including automated weather stations with telemetry transmission, to warn of extreme rainfall events and halt tunnelling.These conditions reflected the climate impacts the State has been facing since the 2018 floods and acknowledged that environmental appraisal must account for climate uncertainty.Also read: The Wayanad Landslide Was an Avoidable and Man-Made TragedySixteen months later, the project site experienced a landslide nonetheless. The incident raises a harder question: whether conditions framed around hazard management were ever adequate to address the compounding risk posed by erratic, high-intensity rainfall on an already destabilised landscape. It also raises a simpler one, now before the state government: whether those conditions were implemented at all. These two questions point in the same direction. A climate-sensitive condition is only as protective as the assessment that frames it and the system that enforces it afterwards.However, the approach adopted in the Wayanad tunnel project appraisal remains an exception rather than the norm. The standard Terms of Reference (ToR) under the 2006 Notification emphasise baseline components such as biodiversity, forests, geology, hydrology and pollution, while climate change is not routinely specified as a core scoping requirement. The Wayanad tunnel received close scrutiny because it followed the 2024 landslides, whereas most projects receive far less. Making the EIA process climate-responsiveConsidering the growing risks posed by climate change and the potential of EIA, the most immediate reform would be to integrate climate change considerations into the scoping stage, where Expert Appraisal Committees (EACs) determine the ToR that guides the EIA. Climate considerations should become a routine part of scoping, with proper examination of how projected rainfall, temperature, and other climate variables may alter the environmental impacts of projects and pose risks to the project and local populations. This should draw on scientific tools, including climate projections and modelling, rather than hazard-based planning or disaster memory alone.This also requires strengthening institutional capacity. EACs need expertise in climate science, disaster risk and adaptation planning so that climate-related risks can be evaluated with the same rigour expected in the assessment of biodiversity, geology and pollution. Finally, climate-sensitive appraisal is meaningful only if it is enforced. Compliance with clearance conditions is currently self-reported by proponents; safety-critical conditions warrant independent verification and a compliance record that is open to public scrutinyThe challenge aheadThe deliberations surrounding the Wayanad tunnel project show that the existing EIA framework can engage with climate questions to a limited extent. The recent landslide shows that such engagement, on its own, is not enough to deal with rising climate uncertainty. The task is therefore twofold: to make climate considerations a routine part of environmental assessment across the country, rather than relying on the initiative of individual committees, and to ensure that safeguards produced during assessment survive the journey from the clearance order to the construction site. An instrument built to anticipate environmental risk cannot continue to assess the future using only measurements of the past. Neha Miriam Kurian and Sony R.K. are associate fellows at Sustainable Futures Collaborative.