Will he or won’t he? That’s a question that applies to a lot of topics and will remain unanswered until President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20. The subject I’m wondering about in particular is if Mr. Trump will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement.

The December 2015 accord was a milestone event that some doubted was possible. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations toward a potential solution to stave off the warming of the planet stalled for years due to bitter disputes over whether and how to mandate participation and who should pay for adaptation efforts in countries most vulnerable to climate change. But last year’s agreement on voluntary contributions aimed at holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels was a breakthrough in every sense of the word.

This year’s talks in Marrakesh, Morocco, were rocked by the U.S. presidential election results, which introduced a layer of uncertainty and anxiety.

But it also led other participating countries to express strong support and move forward on key procedural elements needed to fully implement the agreement.

Before the election, Mr. Trump said he doesn’t believe that climate change is real, accused China of making up climate change to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive and vowed to dismantle the agreement. He has since softened his tone, saying he would keep an open mind.

However, Mr. Trump’s selection of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as the new head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not bode well for continued efforts by the federal government to address climate change impacts. Mr. Pruitt is a vocal opponent of current EPA efforts to restrain carbon emissions, even suing the agency over its Clean Power Plan — seen as a major contributor to the U.S. efforts to meet its Paris climate agreement reduction target.

Any effort by the Trump administration to withdraw from the agreement would take time and could be met with resistance by other countries in the form of tariffs on U.S. goods — France has already threatened such action. And abandoning the Clean Power Plan is unlikely to reverse the trend away from fossil fuels toward cleaner forms of energy, with the boom in natural gas supplies making them more affordable than ever.

But risk managers can’t afford to get bogged down in the political debate over climate change and the human contribution, as more than one person in the industry has told me recently. They must move fast to make sure their properties are protected from impending natural catastrophes, as well as the more gradual threat posed by rising sea levels, and that their supply chains remain intact. And they must get extremely creative as properties in certain parts of the world become uninsurable because of climate impacts.

The question is will risk managers have an ally in Mr. Trump or will he hinder those efforts by abandoning the Clean Power Plan and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement? We’ll know soon enough.