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Meeting food demands for the growing global human population requires improving crop productivity, and large gains are possible through enhancing photosynthetic efficiency. But agricultural production is facing unparalleled abiotic stress from global climate change, and there is an urgent need to develop resilient crops for the extreme temperature events that now seem inevitable in the coming century. Therefore, understanding and improving photosynthetic responses to changing environmental conditions is crucial in developing high-yielding resilient crops. Second to only photosynthesis, photorespiration is a significant carbon flux in plant metabolism that can reduce plant growth and yield by upwards of 50% depending on growing temperatures. Optimization or synthetic bypass of the photorespiratory process could dramatically increase crop yield but a better understanding of the photorespiratory process at the compartmental and genetic level is needed.  Synthetic biology has provided new opportunities in altering photorespiratory metabolism so, using a synthetic biology approach, we can now engineer and test hundreds of prototype plants from a range of multigene construct designs aimed at changing plant metabolism. Current progress in pathways tested for alternative photorespiration improved quantum yield of photosynthesis by 20% and increased productivity by 19-37% in replicated field experiments, and improved thermal tolerance in a model crop.