Ladakh, a plateau beyond the Himalayas in the northern tip of India, is under attack.

The enemy is cutting off its water supplies and draining its fields.
Desperate, the farmers who have always raised goats and grown wheat and barley in these arid lands are fleeing to the city of Leh, on the Indus River.
Together with Sonam Wangchuk, I am crossing passes and valleys at over 2,500 meters to see the defenses that the Indian engineer has erected: tall cones of ice that he calls stupa.
This enemy does not wear a uniform, does not claim to be loyal to any state and does not carry automatic weapons, says Wangchuk, who has founded an alternative school here in Ladakh.
He does not stop at borders and does not respect international laws.
We Ladakhis are facing a very different war.
The enemy climate change talks about.
An approximately 1 degree Celsius rise in the region's average winter temperatures over a 40-year period has removed a crucial link from its water cycle.
Nestled between Pakistan and India with the Himalayas to protect it from the southwest monsoon, Ladakh is bathed annually by an average of just 110 mm of rain.
Its lifeblood is winter snow and mountain glaciers.
But the snows have become fickle and melt before spring planting, while the glaciers have retreated to high altitudes and melt later.
The time lag between the melting of snow in late winter and that of glaciers in spring is getting wider, Wangchuk explains.
And it made the cultivation of the land impossible.
The Ladakhis are unable to stop this change.
Ice stupas, however, could return water to the land in the spring.
As we leave the highway to enter a gorge near the border with Pakistan, Wangchuk begins to tell me his story.
In 2013 he noticed that the ice formed in the shadow of a bridge, despite being at low altitude and in the height of summer, was preserved intact.
He thus realized that he could help the villages by freezing the water in the winter for use in the spring.
Shading large expanses of ice was impractical; but a mound of ice would have kept its interior in the shade, preferably with very steep walls, because the verticality reduces the surface exposed to the sun.
The monks of the Phyang Monastery look after the willows and poplars grown with the meltwater from the stupa.
The trees are intended to green the bare hillside and stabilize it against erosion.
Photo by CIRIL JAZBEC
For followers of Buddhism the stupa is a heap of stones or mud intended to house sacred relics.
Wangchuk and his students built their first ice stupa in November 2013, channeling the waters of a stream near Leh first into a conduit that ran down the side of the mountain, then up a vertical pipe, at the top of which was fixed a nozzle.
That's all, there is no need for high technology.
Lugello was opened at night, when the temperature was below freezing; the sprayed water froze during the fall.
That first test stupa was 6 meters high, contained 150,000 liters of water and was stored until May.
Wangchuk has since taught how to erect ice stupas in various villages in Ladakh.
In 2019, 12 were erected; this year the stupas have reached 26 and nine have reached 30 meters in height.
With optimal size and location, a stupa can make it through the following winter, Wangchuk says.
And the stupa can grow from year to year, becoming perennial, just like a glacier, he adds.
Skirting a precipice we arrive at the village of Karith.
Middle school pupils hail Wangchuk as a hero; it was they, in 2016, who built the first small local stupa.
We want the kids to realize what is happening in the world, says principal Mohammad Ali.
For his part, Wangchuk wants the world to realize what he is doing in Ladakh.
Stupas are a wake-up call to change the high-carbon urban lifestyle, he says.
Last year the Karith stupa was 22 meters high and allowed farmers to irrigate their fields, resisting until the end of August.
One day, says Ali, we will make an ice stupa that will continue to grow.
This stupa near the village of Shara Phuktsey won the grand prize for the largest stupa in a 2019 competition.
The nearly seven and a half million liters of water he stored were used to irrigate the fields of four villages.
The stupa has also become a tourist attraction: some gliders have joined it to climb its steep sides.
Photo by CIRIL JAZBEC
Arati Kumar-Rao lives in Bangalore, India, and writes on water issues.
Ciril Jazbec collaborated with the magazine photographing tech entrepreneurs in Africa and Inuit hunters in Greenland.

From Nationalgeographic