What if the ground beneath our feet could be engineered to do more than support buildings and roads, such as help fight climate change and make communities safer?
Kamelia Atefi, an associate professor at York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering, believes engineers have a unique role in confronting climate change. A warming world brings heavier rains, hotter summers and shifting soils that crack roads, weaken bridges and damage buildings.
Engineers, who design and maintain much of that infrastructure, are uniquely positioned to respond with innovative solutions.
“We cannot use the standard design procedures that we’ve been using,” Atefi says. “We have to redefine the way we are designing things.”
For more than 12 years, Atefi has been contributing to that mandate. A specialist in geomechanics – the branch of civil engineering that studies how soil and rock behave under mechanical, hydraulic and thermal forces – she is reshaping the field through a climate‑focused lens. Instead of treating the ground merely as a foundation, her work examines how it can actively reduce carbon emissions, improve resilience and support sustainable construction.
For example, among her projects, Atefi is exploring innovations through geothermal energy – the heat stored beneath the earth’s surface – as an alternative source for electricity, heating and cooling.
Making shallow geothermal cooling systems work safely and efficiently requires understanding how underground heat, water and soil pressures interact; miscalculating any of these forces could cause failures to infrastructure, reduction of energy efficiency or even damage to the nearby ground.
Atefi is pursuing this through a collaborative $7‑million project led by the University of Waterloo and funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation's Innovation Fund (CFI-IF). With $500,000 dedicated to her team at York University, she is collaborating to build the largest geothermal energy and energy geo-storage research centre in Canada.
Using state-of-the-art triaxial testing equipment funded through the CFI-IF project, Atefi will replicate underground conditions in the lab, applying realistic heat, water flow and pressure to soil and rock samples. This allows her team to study how porous materials respond to thermal and hydraulic loads – including those found in geothermal systems and in conditions created by climate change – ensuring that designs can be both safe and efficient for real-world settings.
Atefi's also leads a collaborative project with the University of Guelph, Carleton University and the University of Waterloo that received $250,000 from the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) – Exploration stream. In this project, she is building on a technique called microbiologically induced calcite precipitation (MICP), which emulates a natural process in which bacteria produce calcium carbonate, a mineral that binds soil grains together.
“The whole idea behind MICP is to use natural microbes that exist in this environment, feed them some nutrients and let them grow,” she explains. “They produce a very natural cement – you can call it bio‑cement.”
Engineers can use this process in situations like mine tailings, which are the leftover materials after valuable minerals or metals have been extracted. If unstable, tailings can collapse or leak toxic water; MICP, however, can turn loose, dangerous tailings into something more solid and safer, using bacteria instead of cement.
While bio‑cementation has been successfully demonstrated in field trials and pilot projects around the world, it is not yet a standard ground improvement method – especially in the contexts Atefi is exploring. “We are looking at northern communities, which are completely isolated,” she says. “They have gravel roads, and we want to improve the quality of those roads in harsh environments using a method that is environmentally friendly, without introducing grouting or chemical‑based materials.”
Atefi is tackling these challenges by engineering new bacterial strains and developing tools to monitor and model how the process behaves under real‑world conditions. “The goal,” she says, “is to understand these behaviours better so bio‑cementation can be promoted and tailored to be stronger in harsher environments.”
Though many of these innovations are still in academic or research settings, Atefi says engineers are uniquely positioned to bridge theory and practice. For her, this means actively contributing beyond the lab as Chair of the Climate Change Committee for the Canadian Standards Association code, which sets technical requirements for engineering, construction and safety across Canada. Through this work, for example, she helped revise the foundations code to incorporate climate‑informed design, translating research insights into standards that guide real‑world engineering projects.
Those solutions are what drive Atefi's work. “It’s about finding ways for engineering to not only respond to climate change in practical, real‑world ways, but to re-think design and construction techniques to help mitigate its effects,” she explains. “We want our work to not just stay in the lab but to actually help communities be safer and more sustainable.”