If the gods didn’t want us to eat other humans, they wouldn’t have made them out of meat.

d. All of the above

It might, but I think engineering plants to be drought resistant is still a long way off. There’s more to going from C3 to C4 than just stomatal function, like the typical Kranz anatomy of a C4 plant and the extra biochemical steps in their carbon fixation. Then again, some common crops (like corn) are already C4 plants, so it could be possible to make them even more drought resistant. I just don’t know how they’ll ever improve the yield of crops under drought stress, even if they can survive it.

Edit: that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth looking into, of course.

I think this is a great discovery, but I don’t know if it’s the massive breakthrough the article makes it up to be. Improved water efficiency is great and could cut irrigation costs (if the farmer changes their irrigation method accordingly), but if there’s not enough water in the first place I doubt an improved water use efficiency will do much. Still pretty nice though.