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This chapter offers an introduction to the volume Financial Crises, Poverty and Environmental Sustainability: Challenges in the Context of the SDGs and Covid-19 Recovery. The first part examines the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on socio-environmental sustainability. The pandemic crisis has triggered multiple and interacting social, economic and environmental impacts. The final outcome will depend on the policy actions taken not only to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, but most importantly to transform our current unsustainable socio-environmental model, i.e. whether we will manage to use the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to build forward better. The second part of the chapter assesses the Covid-19 support packages and recovery strategies. We find that existing policy actions are falling short from the transformation that is required to bring our planet onto a sustainable socio-environmental path. For instance, we observe social exclusion and leaving behind those most in need, increase in atmospheric emissions, and loss of biodiversity. In this context, we argue for a rethink of the underlying assumptions that have determined the economy-environment interaction in our societies. We advocate the need to move away from the commercialisation of nature and a 'netzero' rationale, towards a 'do no harm' and 'common good' approach. Our transition to sustainability requires nothing less than a new global eco-social contract. The third part of our chapter presents summaries of the volume's case-studies that inform the above analysis and demonstrate how the above challenges are manifested in countries and communities across the globe.

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