Adapting to climate change and drought: Are stress tolerant plants the right goal?

In a recent Dean's Research Seminar, "Adapting to climate change and drought: Are stress tolerant plants the right goal?", Professor Michael Tausz used the example of drought stress to reflect on how plants cope with stress, and whether this knowledge can help to design more stress tolerant plants. It is particularly important to consider inescapable trade-offs in crop plants between stress tolerance (strong defence) and growth/yield traits, whereby stress tolerant crops may come at too high a yield penalty in ‘good’ seasons. This is a particular conundrum in Australian environments, which are high variable within and between seasons, and often characterised by severe but transient stress events. Plants can and do respond dynamically to changing environmental conditions, and better understanding and exploiting this dynamic ability could be a promising approach towards crops that are well suited to highly variable environments.
All plants have to cope occasionally with sub-optimal environmental factors, often generally called stress factors. Plant stress physiology and the quest for stress tolerant cultured plants is therefore a much researched topic, which has only gained importance with accelerating anthropogenic climate change, which commonly causes more extreme stress conditions, such as heat or drought.