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The 1998 Water Act marked a turning point in the environmental management of water resources in South Africa. Replacing the apartheid-era 1956 Water Act, it was implemented to protect and restore fluvial hydrosystems seriously damaged by uncontrolled industrialisation and unbalanced development between Whites and other groups in past decades. With the creation of the “Reserve”, the environmental value of fluvial hydrosystems has been legally recognised for the first time. But the South African Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) also has to supply safe water to 12 million people, who still lack access to this basic resource. This paper investigates the practical problems of the implementation and enforcement of the Reserve in highly variable and substantially modified hydrosystems.