Robert Furbank was at home in Canberra, Australia, watching a news segment about climate change with his two teenagers this summer when his daughter quipped, “Geez, Dad, you’ve really stuffed things up for us, haven’t you?”

Sitting there as a proxy for the collective old guard, the plant physiologist faced the prospect that the next generation of Australians would be the first to wind up worse off than their parents.

But as it happens, Dr. Furbank is in a position to help the world get ahead of the looming food shortage crisis stemming from global climate change, as rising temperatures, worsening drought, and changing wind and rainfall patterns threaten agriculture’s capacity to feed the world.

Dr. Furbank is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, an enterprise that draws on experts from several Australian universities and the national government’s premier research agency. In tandem with scientists in universities and private labs that span the globe, the center has set its sights on an audacious solution to the impending food crisis: making crops more efficient at conducting photosynthesis.