Himalayan glaciers and ice caps that supply water to more than a billion people in Asia are losing mass up to 10 times less quickly than once feared, a study published on Thursday reported.

Based on an improved analysis of satellite data from 2003 to 2010, the findings offer a reprieve for a region already feeling the impacts of global warming. But they do not mean that the threat of disruptive change has disappeared, the researchers warned.

While taking part in a recent climate change expedition to Antarctica, Bangladesh's representative, Environment and Forests Minister Dr Hasan Mahmud, pointed out Bangladesh's vulnerability to climate change.

Sharing his experience on the expedition at a press conference in the ministry yesterday, Hasan also said many western policymakers and scientists witnessed the alarming rate at which Arctic ice is melting.

The legacy of the "imperfect deal" — as it was called by all participants — at the Copenhagen climate conference two years back continued in the Durban summit last December. People's need had lost out to political manoeuvring. The reason for Durban's failure to come up with a perfect deal, however, was different — and perhaps more fundamental — from Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, the "imperfectness" was linked with the process. The chairman of the conference had bulldozed a consensus with the help of a few countries.

The total volume of water that has melted from all of world’s polar ice sheets, ice caps and mountain glaciers over the past decade would repeatedly fill Britain’s largest lake, Windemere, more than 13,000 times, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of Earth’s frozen ‘cryosphere’. Using a unique pair of satellites that have monitored the disappearing ice on the globe’s surface, scientists estimated that some 1,000 cubic miles of ice has disappeared between 2003 and 2010 — enough to cover the US in one-and-a-half feet of water.