Sea level rise is a growing concern in the islands of the western Pacific. Over the altimetry era (1993-present), sea level rise rates in the western tropical Pacific were amongst the highest recorded across the world ocean, reaching up to 3-4 times the global mean. As more and more affected communities relocate to higher grounds to escape the rising seas, there is a compelling need for information on local scales to ease the adaptation and planning process. This is not a straightforward process as sea level varies regionally, driven by wind and ocean circulation patterns, and the prevailing climate modes (e.g. ENSO, PDO/IPO). On local scales, substantial sea level changes can result from natural or anthropogenic induced vertical ground motion. Motivated by such concerns, this thesis focuses on developing a statistical downscaling technique, namely a multiple linear regression (MLR) model, to simulate island sea levels at selected sites in the southwest Pacific - Suva and Lautoka in Fiji, and Nouméa in New Caledonia. The model is based on the knowledge that sea level variations in the tropical Pacific are mainly thermosteric in nature (temperature-related changes in ocean water density) and that these thermosteric variations are dominated by wind-forced, westward propagating Rossby waves. The MLR experiments are conducted over the 1988-2014 study period, with a focus on interannual-to-decadal sea level variability and trend. Island sea levels are first expressed a sum of steric and mass changes. Then, a more dynamical approach using wind stress curl as a proxy for the thermosteric component is undertaken to construct the MLR model. In the latter case, island sea levels are perceived as a composite of global, regional and local components, where the second is dominant. The MLR model takes wind stress curl as the dominant regional regressor (via a Rossby wave model), and the local halosteric component (salinity-related changes in ocean water density), local wind stress, and local sea surface temperature as minor regressors. A stepwise regression function is used to isolate statistically significant regressors before calibrating the MLR model. The modeled sea level shows high agreement with observations, capturing 80% of the variance on average. Stationarity tests on the MLR model indicate that it can be applied skillfully to projections of future sea level. The statistical downscaling approach overall provides insights on key drivers of sea level variability at the selected sites, showing that while local dynamics and the global signal modulate sea level to a given extent, most of the variance is driven by regional factors. [...]