Pattern forming instabilities are often encountered in a wide variety of natural phenomena and technological applications, from self-organization in biological and chemical systems to oceanic or atmospheric circulation and heat and mass transport processes in engineering systems. Spatiotemporal structures are ubiquitous in hydrodynamics where numerous different convective instabilities generate pattern formation and complex spatiotemporal dynamics, which have been much studied both theoretically and experimentally. In parallel, reaction-diffusion processes provide another large family of pattern forming instabilities and spatio-temporal structures which have been analyzed for several decades. At the intersection of these two fields, "chemo-hydrodynamic patterns and instabilities" resulting from the coupling of hydrodynamic and reaction-diffusion processes have been less studied. The exploration of the new instability and symmetry-breaking scenarios emerging from the interplay between chemical reactions, diffusion and convective motions is a burgeoning field in which numerous exciting problems have emerged during the last few years. These problems range from fingering instabilities of chemical fronts and reactive fluid-fluid interfaces to the dynamics of reaction-diffusion systems in the presence of chaotic mixing. The questions to be addressed are at the interface of hydrodynamics, chemistry, engineering or environmental sciences to name a few and, as a consequence, they have started to draw the attention of several communities including both the nonlinear chemical dynamics and hydrodynamics communities. The collection of papers gathered in this Focus Issue sheds new light on a wide range of phenomena in the general area of chemo-hydrodynamic patterns and instabilities. It also serves as an overview of the current research and state-of-the-art in the field. Chemo-hydrodynamic patterns and instabilities appear in out of equilibrium systems when chemical reactions and diffusion interplay with advection or convection processes. Complex spatio-temporal evolution of concentrations can then set in due to the highly nonlinear character of the underlying dynamics. In this Focus issue, 13 articles discuss recent advances in the area of chemohydrodynamic patterns and instabilities. These articles are representative of three classes of problems in which chemo-hydrodynamic structures are commonly observed and for which simpler model systems can help unraveling key aspect of the dynamics.